The thermometer and the heater

In a large grocery store in Ismailia, new products seem to take off. A crisp nobody had heard of in spring is sold out by the summer. A peanut bar from a small maker appears and the shelf is bare by every weekend.

So the small makers queue to see the store manager. They bring samples. They assume that if he likes them, they are made.

He is a pleasant man and he is not the one they need.

To matter, a gatekeeper needs two things. He needs to reach people who will actually buy, and he needs a hand on what they notice when they get there. The manager has the first. Thousands of families walk past his shelves every week. He does not really have the second. He stocks what the neighbourhood already reaches for, and his till tells him what that is. He is a thermometer, reading the room accurately.

The heater is somewhere else. It is whoever decides which products stand at eye level, which ones sit by the till, which ones get the end of the aisle in the week before school starts. In many stores that decision is made in an office in another city, by people whose names the makers never learn, adjusting a shelf plan without much idea of what it will do to anyone.

Those people have the power. Not because they are famous, but because their small decisions quietly change what a whole town notices.

This is true well beyond a grocery store. The loud place where success appears is often only where success gets recorded.

It is worth working out who reads the temperature and who sets it, before spending a season shaking the wrong hand.