Learning from spaghetti sauce

On the weekend I watched a video talk given by Malcolm Gladwell - "Learning from spaghetti sauce". Although the video is from 2006 I have found it yet. Anyway there are two interesting points in there:

He says that

1. People do not want what they like (or at least they can't explain).
   
   
2. You should not try to find the one perfect product (spaghetti sauce, Cola, Coffee) - instead you should take into consideration the diversity of people and create several different solutions to serve different groups of people.

I am still not sure whether this can be applied to all businesses, but I am quite sure that it can be applied to more businesses than just the food business.

The more generic lessons that I learn from it anyway:

1. People may have difficulties explaining their desires or needs.
   This might be a reason why in bidding or project documents requirements are often specified only in a very vague way. So don't stop asking to clear the situation and do tests with prototypes of your product or service during the project phases.
   
   
2. You can't create the killer product or killer service. Create a good solution for a specific problem.
   Prefer to provide a good service to a specific group of people over the desire to get everybody satisfied.

Related posts: Focus by direction, direction over goals, Principles over rules.