Review of TED Talks

Malcolm Gladwell: Choice, happiness and spaghetti sauce
Mr. Gladwell explained how Howard Mosokwitz took one idea and changed the true meaning of happiness to people when it comes to the variation of foods. Immediately, I thought that Gladwell would discuss the ingredients that make up spaghetti sauce but in deed the ted talk was not necessarily based around spaghetti sauce. Also, he started off talking about pepsi and I instantly thought the ted talk would be about aspartame that's in pepsi and its harms or how much of the artificial sweetner is actually added. Mr. Gladwell explained that people are more likely to be happy with the variations of a product because people are afraid to voice their own opinion of what they really like. So with food industries, they are making a variety of the same product and advertising the product to make the people aspire to eat the things that they have an idea of liking. Mr. Gladwell used a number of examples to explain how Mr. Mosokwitz used his idea to not make one Pepsi perfect but to make Pepsis better as whole. This ted talk sparked the idea that people could only eat a certain food because of the advertising and because they are not willing enough to voice what they really want. For example, Mr. Gladwell says, if a group of people were asked what kind of coffee they like, majority would give the same answer , "strong, rich, etc.", when some people could possibly like "milky, weak coffee". Mr. Mosokwitz wanted to explore variation and give the people the happiness that they didn't know they were lacking. By giving variation, it gave a whole new meaning to happiness. Also, it gives the people a product that they didn't even know they wanted. Mosokwitz introduced this way of marketing (not sure that's the word I'm looking for), to give people what they were afraid to say they wanted. Now their are a variety of different spaghetti sauces and campbells soups, all to make the people happier. It is interesting because I never thought about why the companies introduced new variations of a product but always assumed that the reason was to make more money and try to beat the competitors.

Word Count: 374 Words