The Everyone Trap

“It’d be nice to please everyone, but I thought it would be more interesting to have a point of view.” - Oscar Levant

In 1986, the Campbell’s Soup Company faced a serious problem: its spaghetti sauce brand, Prego, was losing market share to Ragú, the market leader at the time. The Prego team was frustrated—not just because they were losing, but because they believed they had a far superior product. Their sauce was higher quality—made with diced tomatoes instead of purée, giving it a thicker texture that clung better to pasta—and featured a richer spice blend. But consumers kept buying Ragú.

Prego had fallen into a familiar trap: believing that the best product would naturally attract the most customers. But in a crowded market, chasing universal appeal is like shouting into the wind. No matter how good your product is, not everyone will want the same thing.

Desperate for a solution, Prego called in Howard Moskowitz , a psychophysicist and market researcher from White Plains, New York. Moskowitz is on a shortlist of people who food companies call when they need to better understand consumer preference.

Rather than search for a single “perfect” spaghetti sauce, Moskowitz worked with the Campbell’s kitchens to develop forty-five varieties, each differing in sweetness, spiciness, ingredient quality, tartness, salt level, mouthfeel, and more. He tested these sauces in major cities, bringing in busloads of people, dividing them into groups of 25, and having them sample 10 small bowls of different sauces over two hours. Afterward, participants rated each sauce on a scale from one to one hundred.

At first, the data seemed overwhelming—a chaotic mess of individual preferences. But as Moskowitz sifted through the results, clear patterns began to emerge. Three distinct groups surfaced: those who preferred plain sauce, spicy sauce, and extra-chunky sauce.

Of these groups, the Prego team found the last one most intriguing. At the time, no extra-chunky spaghetti sauce was widely available on supermarket shelves. Rather than continue chasing Ragú’s audience, Prego seized the opportunity to focus on this underserved group. The result was a line of extra-chunky sauce that generated more than $600 million over the next decade, propelling Prego into a leadership position.

Moskowitz’s insights challenged the food industry’s deeply held belief in the “platonic dish”—the notion that there’s one perfect way to prepare a particular dish. He understood something revolutionary: preferences don’t exist on a vertical scale from good to bad, but on a horizontal plane. Success lies in meeting the specific needs of different kinds of people. Prego didn’t win by chasing everyone; it won by serving the right people with the right needs with the right product.

Chasing Everyone Is a Trap.

And most companies in agriculture are caught in it.

We’re paralyzed by the fear that someone, somewhere, might not like what we’re doing. We assume the key to growth is pleasing everyone—serving every grower, every retailer, every market segment. So we stretch ourselves thin, dilute our message, hold back our point of view, and trim the edges off our products, trying to appeal to as many people as possible. But in trying to be everything to everyone, we lose the power to matter to anyone.

This is the path to mass commoditization—a race to the bottom. And the greatest threat to our businesses, and to the future of the industry, is that we might win.

Winning this way means following the same worn-out playbook: chasing volume, shaving margins, and competing on the same terms as everyone else. But we can’t afford to keep playing this game.

Real growth—the kind that transforms businesses and builds lasting value—doesn’t come from trying to be everything to everyone. It comes from being indispensable to the right few: the growers who share your beliefs, the retailers who are in on the same secret, and the partners who share your vision for the future.

The true believers are tired of being underserved. They’ve had enough of being crammed into the one-size-fits-all solutions dominating the market today. They want to see you succeed and are eager to participate in your movement. But first, you need to start one. That begins by walking away from the fatal notion of serving everyone—and choosing to serve a specific someone.

There are two good ways to check into a hotel:

Contactless and high-touch.

There are two good options for dinner: Fast food and fine dining.

And two good retail experiences: Discount and luxury boutique.

It’s the options in the middle that are dull—the average ones that leave us wanting more.

It can be tempting to create a boring product with a safe, predictable message that aligns neatly with investors’ latest obsessions or to give the market more of what it already has. But the problem with this approach is simple: the people content with the status quo aren’t looking for you—they’re actively avoiding you.

Our job is to make a uniquely valuable promise to a uniquely frustrated customer—and deliver on it.

Choose your category, choose your customer, and choose your extreme.

Stop trying to be the best option.

Start being the only option.

The future belongs to companies bold enough to choose. Choose who you serve and how you serve them. Pick a specific group of customers and build something that solves their problems better than anyone else. When you find the right people and offer them the right solution, you stop chasing the market.

You start leading it.

Make something different. Make people care. Make fans, not followers.

Subscribe here