> ever appear on the HN front page? They appear on the front page because of the 'Newman effect'. I just coined that term for back in the day what made Paul Ne

> ever appear on the HN front page? They appear on the front page because of the 'Newman effect'. I just coined that term for back in the day what made Paul Newman's salad dressing successful and has since been copied as a formula by many celebrity brands. Basically if you have two salad dressings on the shelf in a supermarket people will pay attention and potentially buy the one that they notice for a reason that is not even related to the quality of the product. And as everyone knows in sales or marketing (or should know) getting your message across and getting listened to is (arbitrarily I am making this up) half the battle. [1] Of course Paul Newman had other things going for him as well. He could get the supermarket to consider his product because of the halo around him as a movie star. He could get top quality people to help with the product as a result of being a movie star. He even (iirc) pioneered (or at least popularized) giving profits to charity (from memory). But much of the success was for sure dependent on his name recognition which made it more likely that people would try the product (same thing happens with why stars are featured in movies obviously although with Netflix that is becoming less important for sure). [1] This is also what an intro does for you it gets the person to listen to what you have to say which you might not even get the chance to do if you are just cold calling.