Gladwell: The Ketchup Conundrum

Malcolm Gladwell:

Many years ago, one mustard dominated the supermarket shelves: French’s. It came in a plastic bottle. People used it on hot dogs and bologna. It was a yellow mustard, made from ground white mustard seed with turmeric and vinegar, which gave it a mild, slightly metallic taste. If you looked hard in the grocery store, you might find something in the specialty-foods section called Grey Poupon, which was Dijon mustard, made from the more pungent brown mustard seed. In the early seventies, Grey Poupon was no more than a hundred-thousand-dollar-a-year business. Few people knew what it was or how it tasted, or had any particular desire for an alternative to French’s or the runner-up, Gulden’s. Then one day the Heublein Company, which owned Grey Poupon, discovered something remarkable: if you gave people a mustard taste test, a significant number had only to try Grey Poupon once to switch from yellow mustard. In the food world that almost never happens; even among the most successful food brands, only about one in a hundred have that kind of conversion rate. Grey Poupon was magic.

Karl Rove visits Waukesha

Joe Ahlers:

“I was sort of disappointed after the election because my friends in Wisconsin had their spirits down,” Bush campaign manager Karl Rove said Saturday night. “You seem to think you came up short, and you did in the Electoral College. But without your effort here, we wouldn’t have won. You don’t fight someone just in one place, you fight them all along the line and make them spread their resources. You scared the heck out of [Kerry].”
In front of a GOP-packed audience at the Waukesha County Lincoln Day Dinner, the former top Bush campaign manager and current White House deputy chief of staff spoke candidly about the campaign, his relationship to President Bush, and his pride in the people of Waukesha County.