Based on Ted Talk by Malcolm Gladwell Analysis and Insights

1. CHOICE,
HAPPINESS AND
SPAGHETTI
BASED ON THE
TED TALK
BY MALCOLM
GLADWELL

2. MADCOM GLADWELL
•English-born Canadian
journalist, author, and speaker.
•Staff-writer of the New Yorker
•Has written 5 books including
best-sellers like “The Tipping
point", “Blink” and Outliers”
• host of the podcast Revisionist
History

4. •Psychophysicist Howard
Moskowitz forever changed how
the food industry thinks about
consumer preferences.
•PepsiCo asked Harvard to find
level of sugariness people
preferred for their new product
Diet Pepsi.

5. •The resulting data didn’t form a bell curve as
expected. It didn’t make any sense. It was a
mess.
•No single concentration was most popular
•Later he realized “They were looking for the
perfect Pepsi, and they should have been
looking for the perfect Pepsis”

6. IMPORTANT INSIGHTS
•Choice is source of customer happiness
•People don't know what they want

7. STORY OF PREGO PICKLES
•Howard conducted taste tests for Prego, spaghetti
sauce firm
• Prego was lagging far behind market leader Ragu
despite offering a superior product.
•He didn’t look for universal preference and clustered
the data

8. •He found the Americans fell in 3 categories-
•who like spaghetti sauce plain;
•who like spaghetti sauce spicy;
•who like it extra chunky.
•But there was no extra-chunky sauce on the market.
•Prego quickly produced a line of such sauces, which
generated more than $600 million in a decade.
•Similarly Raghu followed the same.

9. IMPORTANT INSIGHT
• Democratize their products and employ
“horizontal segmentation” to reflect the
diversity of the customer base.
• The way to make people happy is not to
give them something more expensive
but to reach to different customers.

10. •People look for universals. They were looking
for one product that would please the maximum
number of people.
•There is no perfect way to achieve a product.
•This is massive disservice.
•We need to understand variability
•Offering a number of distinct types of a product is
better than offering a single, standard product

12. Why and how are these
insights relevant to
managers in India?

13. •Managers should embrace the idea in marketing
that more the number of choices, happier are
customers more likely to be.
•Choices to choose from must be available to
customer after market research because customer
are sometimes unaware of their wants
•Democratize the product and use horizontal
segment
•Manager should avoid universals and offer distinct
types of a product

14. RECAP
•More choices to choose, more
happiness
•People are unaware of their
wants
•Employ “horizontal
segmentation” rather than
hierarchy
•Avoid Universals
•Variability

15. DISCLAIMER
This presen
Soma Bhattacharya
CCET Chandigarh
under the guidance of Prof.
Sameer Mathur, IIM
Lucknow during the
Marketing Internship