Apparently you really can be just born that way.

What do Crystal Pepsi, Watermelon Oreos, Frito-Lay Lemonade, Coors Rocky Mountain Sparkling Water, Colgate Kitchen Entrees and Cheetos Lip Balm all have in common?

The obvious answer is they are all failed products. What is less obvious is that they may also share a fan base — a quirky subgroup of consumers who are systemically drawn to flops and whose reliably contrarian tastes can be used to forecast bad bets in retail sales, real estate and even politics. These people are known as “harbingers of failure.”

The study of harbingers emerged from a 2015 analysis of purchasing patterns at a national convenience store chain. (In exchange for the data, the researchers agreed not to reveal the identity of the chain.) Drawing on six years’ worth of data from the chain’s loyalty card program, a team of marketing professors led by Eric Anderson of Northwestern University classified customers according to their affinity for buying new products that were later pulled from the shelves because of weak demand. Of the roughly 130,000 customers whose purchases were logged, a sizable fraction (about 25 percent) consistently took home products that bombed.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/05/o...r-failure.html