spaghetti sauce

http://www.gladwell.com/2004/2004_09_06_a_ketchup.html

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/20

Malcolm Gladwell has this very interesting article/talk on how to come up with a product that people will truly like. He echoes my point about people not knowing what they like. At least, they dont articulate what they like. Could be because they don't want to reveal what they really like, or simply their mind does not know what their tongue likes. What people want cannot be known by just asking them what they want. If that was possible, we would not need designers, just builders would suffice.

Malcolm talks about the brilliance of Howard Moskowitz: "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. Over the next decade, that new category proved to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars to Prego. "

Here is a guy who dint go blindly by the data. He dint go by what the experts told him were likely to be preferred by people. He dint go by what people said they liked. He designed an experiment , and used the results from the experiment to come to a correct conclusion. It is very easy to come up with data to support a particular hypothesis and then once the hypothesis fails, seek cover under that very same data - "but the data pointed out this". Smart people, instead, know to ask the right questions and derive inferences from the answers.