Malcolm Gladwell’s TED talk “Choice, Happiness and Spaghetti Sauce” is a quick summary of psychophysicist Howard Moskowitz’s experiments on food and happiness.
In his spaghetti experiments in the 1980s, Mowskowitz found that the data clearly divided American’s preferences into three groups, which Gladwell described as “people who like their sauce plain, people who like their sauce spicy, and people who like their sauce extra chunky”. Armed with this information, the company that made Prego spaghetti sauce formulated an extra chunky version which went to make $600 million over the next ten years.
This flew in the face of conventional wisdom at the time, which was that there was one “platonic, perfect dish”, a flavour that would please everyone.
This is an affirmative message for the pasta individualists out there, as well as marketers who seek to profit from segmenting the market. Principle 1 – Segmentation
