Malcom Gladwell Flashcards
What did Howard Moskowitz do?
Howard reinvented spaghetti sauce
Pepsi example
Pepsi came to him and wanted to make Diet Pepsi using aspartame. Needed him to work out how much aspartame to use, anything below 8% isn’t sweet enough, anything above 12% is too sweet, so what to know whats the sweet spot. Howard makes batches, people test them and give feedback, feedback plotted on curve. Doesn’t make nice bell curve, its all a mess. This was not good enough for Howard, one day he realised they were asking wrong question; which is perfect Pepsi, not the perfect pepsis.
Campbells soup
Make Prego, which was struggling next to Ragu in 70’s/80’s even though Prego was more superior and better quality.
Came to Howard for help, he looked at product and thought it was dead.
He made 45 variations of spaghetti sauces by sweetness, tartness, sourness, garlic level, visible solids.
He took them all over America, and got loads of people to test 10 bowls of sauces. they then rates on scale of 1-100 how good they thought sauce was.
He looked at data and tried to group into clusters.
All Americans fall into three categories: plain, spicy and extra chunky.
No one was producing extra chunky sauce even though 1/3 of Americans want this.
Prego immediately made it and it took over industry, 600 million just from that line.
People don’t know what they want until they are given it.
Horizontal segmentation -
Used to think the way to make people is give them something better than they have already and something to aspire to. Howard said this is wrong, there are just different mustards that different people like, there is no hierarchy.
Howard also changed the idea that there was one way to make a dish and so one way to make spaghetti sauce and so believes in mass marketing which was a mistake. There was movement from universals to understanding of variability.
