How do companies figure out what consumers want? For example, when you look at all the different types of spaghetti sauce in the grocery store, do you wonder how the endless varieties were developed? In many cases, the companies may have just guessed, but they also may have used methods developed by Howard Moskowitz, an expert in the field of psychophysics, and author of the upcoming book Selling Blue Elephants. …..HUH?

Let me explain…..

In 1986, Howard Moskowitz got a call from the Campbell’s Soup Company. They were in the spaghetti-sauce business, going up against Ragú with their Prego brand. Prego was a little thicker than Ragú, with diced tomatoes as opposed to Ragú’s purée, and, Campbell’s thought, had better pasta adherence. But, for all that, Prego was in a slump, and Campbell’s was desperate for new ideas….Howard to the rescue!

Standard practice in the food industry would have been to convene a focus group and ask spaghetti sauce eaters what they wanted. But Moskowitz does not believe that consumers—even spaghetti lovers—know what they desire if what they desire does not yet exist. Makes sense right?

“The mind,” as Moskowitz is fond of saying, “knows not what the tongue wants.” Instead, working with the Campbell’s kitchens, he came up with forty-five varieties of spaghetti sauce. These were designed to differ in every conceivable way: spiciness, sweetness, tartness, saltiness, thickness, aroma, mouth feel, cost of ingredients, and so forth. He had a trained panel of food tasters analyze each of those varieties in depth. Then he took the prototypes on the road—to New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Jacksonville—and asked people in groups of twenty-five to eat between eight and ten small bowls of different spaghetti sauces over two hours and rate them on a scale of one to a hundred.

When Moskowitz charted the results, he saw that everyone had a slightly different definition of what a perfect spaghetti sauce tasted like. If you sifted carefully through the data, though, you could find patterns, and Moskowitz learned that most people’s preferences fell into one of three broad groups: plain, spicy, and extra-chunky, and of those three the last was the most important. Why? Because at the time there was no extra-chunky spaghetti sauce in the supermarket. WOW!

Over the next decade, that new category proved to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars to Prego. “We all said, ‘Wow!’ ” Monica Wood, who was then the head of market research for Campbell’s, recalls. “Here there was this third segment—people who liked their spaghetti sauce with lots of stuff in it—and it was completely untapped. So in about 1989-90 we launched Prego extra-chunky. It was extraordinarily successful.” In fact, over the next 10 years, the company made over $600 million dollars off their line of “extra chunky” sauces!

HERE IS A VIDEO WITH MALCOLM GLADWELL’S VERSION OF THE STORY

Oh, by the way, Howard Moskowitz is also the brains behind the success of Grey Poupon mustard….quite a guy!