You Can’t Please All the People All the Time (And Here’s Why)

And now, an IM conversation between Dave and myself.

Dave Selden: 10:11
very interesting article here:
http://www.gladwell.com/2004/2004_09_06_a_ketchup.html

Dave Selden: 10:11
I really like the “mind doesn’t know what the tongue wants” part
the fact that you can’t design a universal ketchup and please people
you have to design several ketchups that sub-groups can rally around

Thom Schoenborn: 10:14
reading:
“Try my ketchup!” Wigon said, over and over, to anyone who passed. “If you don’t try it, you’re doomed to eat Heinz the rest of your life.”

Dave Selden: 10:14
seriously
sarah and I don’t eat ketchup
I guess we would buy ketchup if it tasted better
not something I really ever thought about

Thom Schoenborn: 10:14
ketchup in australia is awesome.
no sugar.
just tomato and vinegar

Dave Selden: 10:15
wow

Thom Schoenborn: 10:15
with their bacon, which we call canadian bacon?
kick-ass.

Dave Selden: 10:15
ha
maybe I will make that next
british bacon is also awesome

Thom Schoenborn: 10:16
for sure:
“You know why you like it so much?” he would say, in his broad Boston accent, to the customers who seemed most impressed. “Because you’ve been eating bad ketchup.”

Dave Selden: 10:17
“If you are four—and I have a four-year-old—he doesn’t get to choose what he eats for dinner, in most cases,” Keller says. “But the one thing he can control is ketchup. It’s the one part of the food experience that he can customize and personalize.” As a result, Heinz came out with the so-called EZ Squirt bottle, made out of soft plastic with a conical nozzle. In homes where the EZ Squirt is used, ketchup consumption has grown by as much as twelve per cent.
Small children tend to be neophobic: once they hit two or three, they shrink from new tastes. That makes sense, evolutionarily, because through much of human history that is the age at which children would have first begun to gather and forage for themselves, and those who strayed from what was known and trusted would never have survived.”

Thom Schoenborn: 10:18
Interesting.
I like the concept of the multiple versions of perfection:
“Instead, working with the Campbell’s kitchens, he came up with forty-five varieties of spaghetti sauce. [snip] 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.”

Dave Selden: 10:20
totally

Thom Schoenborn: 10:21
You can’t please all the people all the time, basically.

Dave Selden: 10:21
yeah

Thom Schoenborn: 10:21
“If I make one group happier, I piss off another group. We did this for coffee with General Foods, and we found that if you create only one product the best you can get across all the segments is a 60—if you’re lucky. That’s if you were to treat everybody as one big happy family. But if I do the sensory segmentation, I can get 70, 71, 72. Is that big? Ahhh. It’s a very big difference. In coffee, a 71 is something you’ll die for.”

Dave Selden: 10:21
totally

Thom Schoenborn: 10:21
in college, my magazine prof was the founder and editor of Guitar magazine.
about 10% of their subscriber base were bass players
they had, like, two sections of each issue dedicated to bass players.
and when they cut one of those sections, ONE SINGLE PAGE of editorial, they lost something like 8% of their subscriber base.

Dave Selden: 10:23
funny
that’s a lot

Thom Schoenborn: 10:23
in many ways, it’s about knowing not just what people like about your product — because people tend to like a lot of things about what you offer —
it’s about knowing about how passionate they are about those things.
which is a little different than this subject.
but they’re related.
We should just copy and paste this IM convo into a 72dpiiintheshade post.

Dave Selden: 10:24
do it.