I’m a big fan of Malcolm Gladwell. Read both Blink and The Tipping Point, and always enjoy his articles in the New Yorker.
A couple years ago he had written an article about tomato sauce. Combine this with the fact that the TED Conference has tons of videos up on their site. They have one of Malcolm Gladwell from the 2004 conference that takes the idea from the article and expresses it in about 20 minutes. So if you didn’t read the article from the link above, check out the video and then come on back, because the rest of this post probably won’t make much sense until you watch it. Don’t worry, it’s good, and you’ll enjoy it.
Malcolm Gladwell talks about tomato sauce.
“Being everything to everyone” applies to pretty much anything, from tomato sauce to mp3 players to creative experience studios.
There are a lot of agencies that try to be everything for everyone. They end up being like Ragu… sort of a watery, traditional sauce. Do people still want that?
There’s a quote at the end of the video that talks about coffee. It says something along the lines that 60% of people will say they like a general type of coffee and 75% of people will say they like a type of coffee within a certain cluster. It’s the difference between “coffee that makes you wince and coffee that makes you deliriously happy.”
Wouldn’t you rather be the agency that makes people deliriously happy?
ps. If anyone wants to sponsor me to go to TED2007, let me know.
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