360° Digital Artist

Malcolm Gladwell, writer for the New Yorker and author of several books, gave a talk at a TED conference on the subject of spaghetti sauce. You are probably asking yourself, "What does spaghetti sauce have to do with anything, especially music branding?" Since Mr. Gladwell is a rather entertaining storyteller, I'm embedding the video of the talk below. I will then explain what the narrative means to me personally by discussing application of his subject to music branding.

Pepsi and Prego
The inspiration of the before mentioned talk is Dr. Howard Moskowitz, who as Mr. Gladwell put it, "is most famous for reinventing spaghetti sauce." As stated, the story begins with Pepsi commissioning Dr. Moskowitz to find the perfect Diet Pepsi using the new sweetener, aspartame. Through his experiments and taste tests with focus groups, he gathered data that he felt did not make any sense. There was no clear determination as to what was the perfect sweetness for Diet Pepsi.

He later had a realization of what was the problem with the research he did for Pepsi. As Mr. Gladwell put it, "They were asking the wrong question. They were looking for the perfect Pepsi, and they should have been looking for the perfect Pepsis."

The Campbell's Soup Company contacted Dr. Moskowitz about revising their Prego spaghetti sauce to help it be more competitive with Ragú. He took his new conclusions from the Pepsi experiment and devised a study for Prego, creating 45 varieties of spaghetti sauce for testing. As he grouped the data into different clusters, he discovered Americans can be divided into three groups. He discovered that a third of Americans desire chunky spaghetti sauce, and up to that point, no one had ever marketed chunky. So a revolution was born, and now several types of spaghetti sauce (including chunky) exist at the supermarket to fulfill the various tastes and desires of consumers.

Although an interesting story on spaghetti sauce, you are probably still wondering what it has to do with the world of music. Malcolm Gladwell made three points that apply to branding music to fans.

Horizontal Segmentation
Before the spaghetti sauce revolution, those in the food industry thought that if a product were created that was more expensive and conceived as being better than another product, it would make people happy. This was the case with Grey Poupon supposedly being a better mustard than French's.

Dr. Moskowitz disagreed with the industry, feeling that food is actually part of "horizontal segmentation." As Mr. Gladwell put it:

Mustard does not exist on a hierarchy. Mustard exists, just like tomato sauce, on a horizontal plane. There is no good mustard, or bad mustard. There is no perfect mustard, or imperfect mustard. There are only different kinds of mustards that suit different kinds of people.

The record industry seems to follow the same ideology of the food industry in trying to find the next big thing. If they can find a superstar, they can put their major promotion behind them and be a huge success.

People purchase music from major labels not necessarily because it most meets their need for happiness and enjoyment, but because it is all that is made available. Various styles of music are not better than the other styles, they are just different. Instead of looking for the next big thing, we should search for genres of music that meet various horizontal segments of society.

Human Variability
Mr. Gladwell explained that the food industry had the notion that there should be only one way, a perfect way, to prepare a dish or produce a food item. He said they were looking for "cooking universals." They believed there must be one way to make everyone happy. This didn't take into account "human variability." As Dr. Moskowitz discovered, we are all different and can not all be satisfied by one product.

Have you ever noticed that a lot of the music played on main stream radio sounds the same? It is because there is the same notion that there is a universal sound that appeals to everyone. When a new sound is discovered that becomes popular, everyone copies it.

There is room for exploration and variety in today's popular music. There is also a limit as to how far creativity can be stretched to remain popular. To put it in food terms, while creating an array of spaghetti sauces, don't throw in a chocolate sauce. Although someone out there might actually like it, the variety won't be enjoyed by a large enough group to be accepted by the whole. It has to be high on the happiness scale for a large enough segment of the audience to be either liked or tolerated by the average music listener.

Food for Thought
Another practice in the music industry is that of throwing music out there and seeing what gets accepted. For a label, or an artists for that matter, to discover what elements of music will click with the various segments of their fan base, market research needs to be done. This market research is normally used by a business to create a brand or to discover proper extensions for a brand. Various demographic and psychographic information concerning the target audience is gathered, such as age, gender, occupation, financial status, cultural preferences, and societal participation.

The problem with the normal market research is that although it will give a picture of the customer, it may not unlock the mystery of their true musical tastes. Dr. Moskowitz uncovered with his research the fact that a third of Americans want chunky spaghetti sauce. There had been plenty of market research performed in the past, but no one had ever discovered the hidden desire of the American.

Mr. Gladwell said, "A critically important step in understanding our own desires and tastes is to realize that we cannot always explain what we want deep down." Some creative methods will need to be devised to discover what musical patterns the target market prefers, perhaps music they didn't even realize they liked. Once these gems of information can be gathered concerning specific segments of a target audience, labels can seek out artists and artists can create music that satisfies the unfulfilled desires of fans.

I conclude with this one final quote from Malcolm Gladwell: "Embracing the diversity of human beings, we will find a surer way to true happiness."