Innovations in Market Research with Dr. Howard Moskowitz and Steven Onufrey

You may not recognize the name but Dr. Howard Moskowitz has changed the way you eat. Back in the 1970s when Diet Pepsi asked him to create the perfect sweetness for the soft drink, thereby making the perfect Diet Pepsi Moskowitz went to work - but he found out that there was not a perfect Diet Pepsi but perfect Diet Pepsis. People wanted variety - some liked their soda very sweet, some liked it just a little less. Thanks to his research, we've now have a variety of soda concontions to suit every taste bud. But Moskowitz didn't stop there, he went after spaghetti sauce.

Malcolm Gladwell describes it best: "...in 1986, he (Moskowitz) got a call from the Campbell's Soup Company. They were in the spaghetti-sauce business, going up against Rag with their Prego brand. Prego was a little thicker than Rag, with diced tomatoes as opposed to Rag's pure, 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. Standard practice in the food industry would have been to convene a focus group and ask spaghetti 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. ... 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."