Yoplait Learns to Manufacture Authenticity to Go With Its Yogurt<br />But as the Greek phenomena gained steam — today, it accounts for more than a third of all yogurt sales in the United States — Yoplait’s studies found<br />an interesting hiccup: Even though people said they disliked Greek yogurt, they kept on trying it, again and again, until they learned to like it.<br />“Data regresses to the mean,” said James Gilmore, a professor at the University of Virginia and an author of “Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want.” “Something that’s really original, really authentic, it’s probably not going to score<br />that well because people have a knee-jerk reaction against new things.”<br />Eventually, however, after six long years of releasing Yoplait Greek products<br />that tests indicated should be big successes but almost never were, General Mills finally admitted there was one option left: Executives needed to study the science of manufacturing genuineness.
