Walk down the chocolate aisle and you'll find the same story, told in diminishing weights and expanding air pockets. Tris, Maestro, Gaucho ,they've all joined the Great Thinning. Each year, the bars get lighter, airier, more insubstantial. Pick one up and you're holding what feels less like chocolate and more like the memory of chocolate.
This is happening everywhere, across nearly every CPG category you can name. And it's not just wasteful ,it's catastrophically stupid.
The Misconception: A Tragic Oversimplification
The fundamental error plaguing modern product management springs from two sources: a dramatic oversimplification of what products actually are, and a stunning lack of empathy for how human beings actually experience them.
Here's where most product managers get it spectacularly wrong: they think of "product" as a discrete, quantifiable thing that exists independently of human perception. You know a chocolate bar is 45 grams of cocoa, sugar, and milk solids arranged in a particular configuration. Change the configuration slightly, shave off 5 grams, pump in some air, and your uncle: same product, better margins.
Except it's not the same product at all. Because if you detach product from experience, you literally lose the game. Product is subordinate to experience, and experience is the most important piece. Within experience, there is perception, and within perception, there are implicit, tacit variables that interact with our neurocognitive machinery in ways that spreadsheets simply cannot capture.
What do I mean by variables? Let me give you some examples:
Resistance Gradients: How much resistance increases as you squeeze a product. When you pick up that water bottle and it collapses like a punctured lung, your brain receives a cascade of signals that scream "cheap," "flimsy," "not-quite-right." You haven't saved 2 cents on plastic; you've destroyed the tactile authority of your product.
Mouthfeel Complexity: Not just "creamy" but the temporal narrative of creaminess. Does the texture start light and build? Peak and fade? Quality products have complex mouthfeel journeys, not static textures. Degraded products have the textural sophistication of wet cardboard and your brain knows it.
Fracture Pattern: Break a chocolate bar. Does it snap cleanly along its molded lines or shatter into random shrapril? Clean fracture signals structural integrity, proper tempering, care in manufacture. Random fracture screams "air pockets" and "we cut corners." Your customers may not consciously understand why, but they feel it.
Dissolution Dynamics: How does the product break down in saliva? Does it dissolve smoothly or turn grainy? Does it coat your mouth pleasantly or leave you reaching for water? This temporal texture shapes satisfaction in ways that last long after the product is gone.
These perceptual variables aren't marginal details. They're the entire game. And here's the truly maddening part for your average MBA: perception is a complex system. It's not nearly as deterministic as they'd like to believe ,it's probabilistic. Mess with one element and everything falls apart. It's like removing a minor chord from a symphony and wondering why it now sounds like a nursery rhyme.
If you want to craft a unique experience, you need to understand how perception works and how to play with it. The product is a system, and systems don't respond well to ham-fisted cost optimization.
This is why the greatest product developers in history ,Steve Jobs springs to mind , were essentially artists, not engineers. Artists can handle this complexity. They understand that human perception is not a deterministic system you can optimize with a spreadsheet. It's probabilistic, contextual, and maddeningly holistic.
You cannot A/B test your way to an iPhone. You cannot focus-group your way to chocolate that makes people close their eyes and smile.
But you can quantify cost savings. And therein lies the trap.
The Risk Epidemic
My hypothesis: Tunisian companies (and frankly, most companies everywhere) suffer from catastrophically low risk tolerance. If you're a product developer, you must quantify your ideas to get validation from management. But innovation is fundamentally unquantifiable and probabilistic, while cost-cutting offers the siren song of certainty: cut X grams of material, save Y dinars. Guaranteed.
They've become addicted to it like rats pressing a lever for dopamine hits.
Meanwhile, the product developer who says "I think if we use proper tempering and real cocoa butter, people will love it and tell their friends" gets laughed out of the room. Where are your numbers? What's your ROI projection? How do you know?
You don't know. That's the point. You're making a bet on human psychology, and human psychology is gloriously, infuriatingly uncertain.
Quantification Bias: When Numbers Make You Stupid
This is what I call Quantification Bias: overestimating the importance of quantifiable data while ignoring psychology and perception. It's like navigating by only looking at the instruments while ignoring the road ahead.
Yes, you can measure that you saved 0.8 dinars per unit. But can you measure the cumulative degradation of trust? The slow erosion of brand meaning? The moment when your product crosses below the category prototype in consumers' minds and stops being "chocolate" and becomes "chocolate-flavored product"?
No. You can't. Not until it's far too late.
The Category Killer Hypothesis
Here's the truly terrifying part: these cost-cutting measures aren't just product killers , ,they're category killers.
When every chocolate bar in Tunisia degrades simultaneously, consumers don't just switch brands. They might switch categories entirely. They start buying dates. Or pastries. Or nothing. The entire "impulse chocolate" category could shrink by 30% while everyone's frantically fighting over the remaining share, wondering what happened.
Your brain has a prototype for "chocolate bar" ,an idealized average built from years of experience. When products degrade below that prototype, they stop feeling like the real thing and start feeling like imitations. You've exited the category in consumers' minds, and all the marketing in the world won't get you back in.
The Opportunity: Contrast Volatility
But here's where it gets gloriously interesting and why I believe we're living through an unprecedented opportunity for anyone brave enough to seize it.
Product quality has become so uniformly, so catastrophically terrible that the simple act of making a good product will make you instantly viral. Not "might make you viral." Will make you viral.
These are precisely the conditions for virality. And most companies are completely blind to it.
Why? Because the contrast will be so enormous, so viscerally noticeable, that it bypasses rational evaluation entirely and hits people at a gut level. When everything around you is disappointingly light, suspiciously airy, and vaguely unsatisfying, encountering something with actual substance is a physical shock to the system. It's like walking through a desert and finding a waterfall.
This contrast only exists because the other products are so freakishly bad. Your competitors have inadvertently created the perfect conditions for your success by systematically degrading their own offerings. They've lowered the bar so dramatically that simply meeting basic expectations feels revolutionary.
This is what I call Contrast Volatility : in a degraded landscape, basic competence becomes newsworthy. Quality becomes its own marketing department. "This chocolate actually snaps" becomes something people tell their friends. "This water bottle doesn't collapse when I hold it" becomes a conversation topic. You've turned basic competence into a differentiator, and you've done it without spending a dinar on advertising.
Look at Waffle Chocotom in Tunisia. They didn't hire a fancy agency. They didn't launch a clever social media campaign. They didn't do anything particularly revolutionary from a marketing perspective. They simply made a waffle that actually felt substantial , a waffle with weight, with presence, with the perceptual variables intact. And people couldn't stop talking about it.
Because in a market where every waffle feels like eating sweetened air, encountering one that has actual heft is remarkable. Literally: worth remarking upon. The product did the marketing for them.
The contrast was so stark, so immediately perceptible, that it triggered word-of-mouth as a natural consequence. People's perceptual expectations were so thoroughly violatedin a good way , that sharing the discovery became irresistible.
This is the opportunity your competitors have handed you on a silver platter while they obsess over shaving another 2 grams off their products. The worse they make their offerings, the more dramatic your entrance can be. They're not just your competitors anymore ,they're unwittingly creating the perfect context for your success.
The Counterintuitive Play
So while your competitors are doing price compensations just to stay in the game, you should raise prices and offer quality.
I know,it sounds insane. But companies could gain vastly more from having a better product than from cutting costs. The problem is that cost-cutting is deterministic and thus psychologically safe. You know you'll save money. You know exactly how much.
Product improvement is uncertain, probabilistic, risky. It's a mindset problem. But the returns are enormous if you have the courage to play a different game.
The Way Forward
The great irony is that we're living in an age of unprecedented opportunity for anyone willing to make something genuinely good. The bar both literally and figuratively has never been lower.
Make a water bottle people can actually hold. Make chocolate that snaps properly and melts luxuriously. Make products that respect the remarkable perceptual machinery your customers are walking around with.
The contrast will be so dramatic, so noticeable against the degraded landscape, that you won't need much marketing at all. Quality will be its own advertisement.
But it requires courage. It requires accepting uncertainty. It requires believing that the unquantifiable aspects of human experience matter more than the tidy numbers in your spreadsheet.
It requires, in short, treating your customers like human beings rather than throat-holes for product.
Who's brave enough to try?
Because in the end, the question isn't whether you can afford to make a better product. It's whether you can afford not to.
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