Plain, Spicy, or...Hey, That's New!
I spent a huge block of time today watching lectures delivered at the Technology, Entertainment, and Design (TED) conference, available online at ted.com. Some of the lectures are dull, others fascinating, fascinating enough to keep me from doing the dishes yet today. Many lectures offer proposals built upon dubious leaps of reasoning.
The most interesting I’ve seen so far is a history on one man’s effect on the entire market, stemming from a Diet Pepsi marketing contract. Harold Moskowitz’s great discovery was that, instead of a single norm for people’s taste in diet cola, people clustered in several distinct regions of preference. Eventually, Moskowitz took this insight to a huge success for Prego, which was then losing a market battle with Ragu as they competed for market share by trying to match the average taste in spaghetti sauce—an average taste that did not, in fact, exist. Armed with the discovery that consumers divided into three distinct camps (plain, spicy, chunky), Prego soared into market dominance with three different Prego flavors. The discovery was all the more significant because consumers never asked for chunky sauce; they hadn’t even considered that possible variation.
The principle that there is no single, ideal version of a consumer product, but rather several ideal versions for several distinct tastes was a radical idea at the time. For years between the Pepsi contract and Prego’s success, Moskowitz had a hard time selling his notion that there is no perfect pickle, but various perfect pickles; no perfect diet soda, but various perfect diet sodas. The idea took a surprisingly long time to take root; manufacturers persisted in learning the wrong lessons from successful introductions of new products.
This strikes me as terribly odd, because “at the time” was the ‘70s and early ‘80s—after my birth. Only dimly do I recall a time when Kraft had only one flavor of barbecue sauce, or Kleenex one color of tissue, though I can indeed recall it dimly. So saturated are our stores with variety today that it seems inconceivable that people wouldn’t realize shoppers had different tastes, certainly inconceivable for marketing teams whose very job it is to identify and target tastes. And I know full well marketing departments have been around longer than thirty-five years.
Before today, I had no idea that I owe all this freedom of choice to one person, or that his idea should have required a one-man crusade. Now that I do, I’m deeply grateful.