Name: 【TED】Malcolm Gladwell 談義大利麵醬 (Spaghetti sauce)
Uploaded: 2013-02-13T12:48:19.000Z
Duration: 17 min 34 s
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基礎被動語態

I think I was supposed to talk about my new book,

which is called "Blink," and it's about snap judgments and first impressions.

And it comes out in January, and I hope you all buy it in triplicate.

and I realized that although my new book makes me happy,

So I decided instead, I would talk about someone who

I think has done as much to make Americans happy

as perhaps anyone over the last 20 years.

A man who is a great personal hero of mine.

who is most famous for reinventing spaghetti sauce.

Howard's about this high, and he's round,

and he's in his sixties, and he has big huge glasses

and thinning grey hair, and he has a kind of wonderful exuberance and vitality,

and he has a parrot, and he loves the opera,

and he's a great aficionado of medieval history.

And by profession, he's a psychophysicist.

Now, I should tell you that I have no idea what psychophysics is,

although at some point in my life, I dated a girl for two years who was getting

Which should tell you something about that relationship. (Laughter)

As far as I know, psychophysics is about measuring things.

And Howard is very interested in measuring things.

And he graduated with his doctorate from Harvard,

and he set up a little consulting shop in White Plains, New York.

And one of his first clients was -- this is many years ago, back in the early '70s

"You know, there's this new thing called aspartame,

We'd like you to figure out how much aspartame we should put in

each can of Diet Pepsi, in order to have the perfect drink."  Right?

Now that sounds like an incredibly straightforward question to answer,

and that's what Howard thought. Because Pepsi told him,

"Look, we're working with a band between eight and 12 percent.

Anything below eight percent sweetness is not sweet enough,

anything above 12 percent sweetness is too sweet.

We want to know, what's the sweet spot between eight and 12?"

Now, if I gave you this problem to do, you would all say, it's very simple.

What we do, is you make up a big experimental batch of Pepsi,

at every degree of sweetness -- eight percent, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3,

all the way up to 12 -- and we try this out with thousands of people,

and we take the most popular concentration. Right? Really simple.

Howard does the experiment, and he gets the data back, and he plots it on a curve,

and all of a sudden he realizes it's not a nice bell curve.

In fact, the data doesn't make any sense.

Now, most people in that business, in the world of testing food and such,

are not dismayed when the data comes back a mess.

They think, well, you know, figuring out what people think about cola's not that easy.

You know, maybe we made an error somewhere along the way.

You know, let's just make an educated guess,

and they simply point and they go for 10 percent, right in the middle.

Howard is a man of a certain degree of intellectual standards.

and this question bedeviled him for years.

And he would think it through and say, what was wrong?

Why could we not make sense of this experiment with Diet Pepsi?

And one day, he was sitting in a diner in White Plains,

about to go trying to dream up some work for NescafE.

And suddenly, like a bolt of lightning, the answer came to him.

And that is, that when they analyzed the Diet Pepsi data,

and they should have been looking for the perfect Pepsis. Trust me.

This was one of the most brilliant breakthroughs in all of food science.

and he would go to conferences around the country,

"You had been looking for the perfect Pepsi. You're wrong.

You should be looking for the perfect Pepsis."

And people would look at him with a blank look, and they would say,

"What are you talking about? This is craziness."

And they would say, you know, "Move! Next!"

Tried to get business, nobody would hire him -- he was obsessed, though,

and he talked about it and talked about it and talked about it.

"to a worm in horseradish, the world is horseradish."

This was his horseradish. (Laughter) He was obsessed with it!

And finally, he had a breakthrough. Vlasic Pickles came to him,

and they said, "Mr. Moskowitz -- Doctor Moskowitz --

we want to make the perfect pickle." And he said,

"There is no perfect pickle, there are only perfect pickles."

And he came back to them and he said, "You don't just need to improve your regular,

Then the next person came to him, and that was Campbell's Soup.

And this was even more important. In fact,

Campbell's Soup is where Howard made his reputation.

Campbell's made Prego, and Prego, in the early '80s, was struggling next to Ragu,

which was the dominant spaghetti sauce of the '70s and '80s.

Now in the industry -- I don't know whether you care about this,

But it was, technically speaking -- this is an aside --

Prego is a better tomato sauce than Ragu.

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【TED】Malcolm Gladwell 談義大利麵醬 (Spaghetti sauce)

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