Task 10.2

Gladwell’s video revolved around Howard Moscowitz and his impact on the food industry.

The issue was first noted when Pepsi came to Moscowitz with the aim of creating the perfect Diet Pepsi. As per traditional methods, Moscowitz went about his research by making large batches of Pepsi with different amounts of aspartame, asking people to sample them and plotting down the results in a graphical format to ascertain some sort of pattern. The problem however was that Moscowitz found no distinguishable pattern. While most researchers may not be bothered by this, Moscowitz was obsessed with trying to figure out why it made no sense.

A stroke of brilliance finally overcame him when he realised that the reason for those ‘messy results’ is: People have been asking the wrong question. Instead of looking for the perfect Pepsi, they should have looked for the perfect Pepsis.

Moscowitz finally got to implement this idea with Campbell and their spaghetti sauces. He created 45 varieties of spaghetti sauce according to all the different ways spaghetti sauce can vary from each other; sweetness, amount of garlic, sourness, ‘tomamoey-ness’, visible solids... From here he gathered people to taste the sauces and instead of finding the most popular one, he focused on grouping them into clusters. He found that Americans are fans of 3 main areas: smooth, spicy and (something that was not in the market at the time) chunky.

This method of collecting information is different from the traditional methods of asking people what they want. As Gladwell points out however, people don’t tend to know what they want. And even if they do, they don’t know how to communicate it.

Another popular marketing concept at that time was by creating hierarchies for products. In doing so, companies created the perception of luxury or higher standards for customers to aspire to. This concept of hierarchical marketing, Moscowitz points out, does not really exist; all products lie on a horizontal plane and can therefore only be segmented horizontally.

Overall there is no one perfect way to create the perfect dish. Moscowitz highlights the importance of moving from the idea of universals to understanding the idea of variability, and only in “embracing the diversity of human beings will we find a sure way to true happiness”.

This idea of diversity can also be seen in software development projects. No one program can be implemented to all systems and be expected to work very well. It is therefore up to system analysts to make sure that the system they develop is designed specifically to suit the needs of the users and their environment. The key to doing this is gathering the correct information during the analysis phase. Yes, this includes asking the correct questions so that analysis and recommendations can be formed according to the system’s capabilities as well as user requirements.