By Erica Gustafson, Opinion Editor
From the moment we get up in the morning, we are constantly making daily decisions. Most of these decisions are based around our personal wants and needs. Some of these involve what we eat and wear, who we talk to and what we decide to do in our spare time. The biggest decision most people contemplate is the different things we might purchase. The thing that most people don’t think about is if we really know what we actually want.
In my consumer behavior class, we were asked to review a 2004 TED Talk from Malcolm Gladwell and answer questions accordingly. Malcolm Gladwell is a Canadian journalist, author and public speaker. In his TED Talk, Gladwell talks about the work of a psychophysicist, Howard Moskowitz.
Working with one of his first clients, Pepsi, Moskowitz took a huge experimental batch of Pepsi with different sweetness levels and plotted all results on a curve to see which is the most popular among consumers. However, the plotted curve did not make any sense.
One of the biggest things is that he changed the momentum of purchases by changing a question. In conferences across the country, he continued sharing this new concept. “You had been looking for the perfect Pepsi. You’re wrong. You should be looking for the perfect Pepsis.”
Moskowitz took this mentality in working with other companies including Campbell’s Soup. Campbell’s created Prego spaghetti sauce which was struggling beside its competitor Ragú in the 1970s.
Moskowitz decided to work with Campbell’s to create 45 varieties of spaghetti sauce in every aspect he could think of.
He took these sauces to travel and had people test some of the different sauces. Then he had them rate each on how good each tester thought they were. After analyzing all of the data, they discovered that they could group all of the results into three categories of plain, spicy and extra chunky spaghetti sauces.
Prego reformulated their spaghetti sauce to include an extra chunky line and brought in $600 million over the next 10 years.
The whole point of Moskowitz work is to understand the desires of consumers. Gladwell stated, “a critically important step in understanding our own desires and tastes is to realize that we cannot always explain what we want, deep down.”
Moskowitz also emphasized his concept of horizontal segmentation. The idea revolved around the fact that, “the way to make people happy is to give them something that is more expensive, something to aspire to. It’s to make them turn their back on what they think they like now and reach out for something higher up.”
There is no such product available that can be considered perfect for every consumer. If people are not given choices between variety in products, they probably will not be able to decipher what they want in the first place.
Consumers given various choices are more likely to pick a product that is more suited for their actual wants. This is why there are numerous products sitting side-by-side along store aisles.
gustafea18@bonaventure.edu
