My last blog of the semester and it is about the GREAT GLADWELL! I remember from last semester when doing FIT2001 System Analysis and Design (SAAD), Gladwell gave an interesting speech on "Armchairs" and how chairs should be made by manufacturers based on consumers requirements with special attention to comfort level. Once again i have a blog to summarize his useful and very INTERESTING speech.
Gladwell introduces "Howard Mascowitz", a personal hero of gladwell who was famous for reinventing the spaghetti sauce and was a reason for Americans to be happy for the last 20 years. Furthermore he describes "Howard Mascowitz" as a wonderfully exuberant person who had interest in measuring things and so was a "Psychophysicist" in profession. He set up a little consultant shop in white lanes, New York and his first client was Pepsi back in the early 1970's.
So Pepsi came up to him and asked him to figure out how much "Aspartame" must be used to make the perfect pepsi. They made his job easy by saying to use a band of 8-12% to figure out which was the sweet spot between this range as below 8% was considered not too sweet enough anf above 12% was considered too much sweet. They took a batch of hundreds of people for the experiment, had them taste pepsi of different degree of concentration, plotted the results on a curve and took the most popular concentration. However, to Howard this seemed messy and meaningless data. He was a man of high intellectual standard and could not make a fair judgement out of the results. So after long and deep thinking, Howard realized that pepsi was asking the wrong question, they should not look for perfect "Pepsi" but perfect "Pepsis."
At first people rejected his idea and thought he was crazy however one day he got a breakthrough when Vlasic Pickles came up to him to help them make perfect pickle. Dr.Mascowitz came up with the idea that not only do they need to improve their regular but should create "Zesty" pickles. Similarly, Campbell Soup, owner of Prego, was struggling in the sphagetti sauce industry against Raghoo and asked Howard Mascowitz to help fix them.
First, Howard went about making 45 varieties of spaghetti sauce which varied from sweetness, sourness, level of garlic, tomatoeness, tartness and visible solids. Just simply any possible way you could imagine spaghetti sauce to be done was made. Now he took a huge sample of these spaghetti sauces and went to Los Angelos, Chicago, New York & Jackson. There he brought in a truckload of people into a hall and made them taste them for 10 different bowls of spaghetti sauce. At the end of testing, he got them to rate each bowl from a range 0-100. Later after a few months he had a ginormous amount of data. Then he decided to group them into clusters and found out that what Americans felt about sphagetti sauce. Mascowitz found that there were 3 groups of that people like about spaghetti sauce: Plain, Spicy and Extra Chunky.
However, at that time there was no company serving the needs of one-third of Americans who were craving for extra chunky spaghetti. Campbell soup changed their spaghetti formula to meet this need. This immediately and completely made them take over the spaghetti sauce industry for the next 10 years. This is were Howard Mascowitz value was realized which led to the making of 14 kinds of mustards, 71 different kinds of olive oil and eventually Raghoo hired Mascowitz. Now in a good supermarket outlet you would find Raghoo available in 36 kinds and 6 varieties: Cheese, Light, Robusto, Old Bowl Traditional and Extra Chunky Garden.
Howard Mascowitz just fundamentally changed the way the food industry thought of making people happy. Before the food industry use to make this 3 assumptions. First they would think that the way to find out what people want to eat or what made them happy was to ask them. This was wrong. People don't know what they want. My favourite quote of Howard Mascowitz was "The mind knows not what the tongue wants."
Second assumption was that food products can be at the top hierarchy. Food industry thought they could make products that were more expensive, more sophisticated and culturally meaningful like remake the italian tomatoes sauces. This was another mistake. Howard Mascowitz introduced the phenomenon of "Horizontal Segmentation". There is no good or bad mustard, no perfect or imperfect mustard. Its just that all mustards exist in the same horizontal plane and different kinds of mustards are made to suit different kinds of people. Simple as that!
Gladwell introduces "Howard Mascowitz", a personal hero of gladwell who was famous for reinventing the spaghetti sauce and was a reason for Americans to be happy for the last 20 years. Furthermore he describes "Howard Mascowitz" as a wonderfully exuberant person who had interest in measuring things and so was a "Psychophysicist" in profession. He set up a little consultant shop in white lanes, New York and his first client was Pepsi back in the early 1970's.
So Pepsi came up to him and asked him to figure out how much "Aspartame" must be used to make the perfect pepsi. They made his job easy by saying to use a band of 8-12% to figure out which was the sweet spot between this range as below 8% was considered not too sweet enough anf above 12% was considered too much sweet. They took a batch of hundreds of people for the experiment, had them taste pepsi of different degree of concentration, plotted the results on a curve and took the most popular concentration. However, to Howard this seemed messy and meaningless data. He was a man of high intellectual standard and could not make a fair judgement out of the results. So after long and deep thinking, Howard realized that pepsi was asking the wrong question, they should not look for perfect "Pepsi" but perfect "Pepsis."
At first people rejected his idea and thought he was crazy however one day he got a breakthrough when Vlasic Pickles came up to him to help them make perfect pickle. Dr.Mascowitz came up with the idea that not only do they need to improve their regular but should create "Zesty" pickles. Similarly, Campbell Soup, owner of Prego, was struggling in the sphagetti sauce industry against Raghoo and asked Howard Mascowitz to help fix them.
First, Howard went about making 45 varieties of spaghetti sauce which varied from sweetness, sourness, level of garlic, tomatoeness, tartness and visible solids. Just simply any possible way you could imagine spaghetti sauce to be done was made. Now he took a huge sample of these spaghetti sauces and went to Los Angelos, Chicago, New York & Jackson. There he brought in a truckload of people into a hall and made them taste them for 10 different bowls of spaghetti sauce. At the end of testing, he got them to rate each bowl from a range 0-100. Later after a few months he had a ginormous amount of data. Then he decided to group them into clusters and found out that what Americans felt about sphagetti sauce. Mascowitz found that there were 3 groups of that people like about spaghetti sauce: Plain, Spicy and Extra Chunky.
However, at that time there was no company serving the needs of one-third of Americans who were craving for extra chunky spaghetti. Campbell soup changed their spaghetti formula to meet this need. This immediately and completely made them take over the spaghetti sauce industry for the next 10 years. This is were Howard Mascowitz value was realized which led to the making of 14 kinds of mustards, 71 different kinds of olive oil and eventually Raghoo hired Mascowitz. Now in a good supermarket outlet you would find Raghoo available in 36 kinds and 6 varieties: Cheese, Light, Robusto, Old Bowl Traditional and Extra Chunky Garden.
Howard Mascowitz just fundamentally changed the way the food industry thought of making people happy. Before the food industry use to make this 3 assumptions. First they would think that the way to find out what people want to eat or what made them happy was to ask them. This was wrong. People don't know what they want. My favourite quote of Howard Mascowitz was "The mind knows not what the tongue wants."
Second assumption was that food products can be at the top hierarchy. Food industry thought they could make products that were more expensive, more sophisticated and culturally meaningful like remake the italian tomatoes sauces. This was another mistake. Howard Mascowitz introduced the phenomenon of "Horizontal Segmentation". There is no good or bad mustard, no perfect or imperfect mustard. Its just that all mustards exist in the same horizontal plane and different kinds of mustards are made to suit different kinds of people. Simple as that!
Third Assumption, the food industry was creating a sense of feeling that there is a perfect way to make a dish. Again this was a big mistake. Howard took over and changed the thinking. People believed more in univerals rather than variables. Example of Universals was to provide culturally authentic dishes like italian sauces would maximize number of satisfaied people whereas variables was basically making dishes in different ways to suit different tastes.
And this was the most important and splendid lesson taught by Mascowitz was that people are different in all aspects and through development and breakthroughs in genetics it has been proved. The tomato sauce needed to realize that this revolution is taking place and by only embracing the diversity of human beings will certainly ensure true happiness.
This ends another exciting semester and i did enjoy writing the last blog. Gladwell was very inspirational with his words and his stories.
Thanks to everyone (especially my followers) for reading my blog.
Best of Luck FIT2027 Students for the EXAM!!!
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