Extremist Carrot Cake Cupcakes
There’s a recent trend on “everything I ate in a day” that usually involves some fete of strength eating lots of sugar, fat, or both. In this case, it was someone eating at bakeries and one item the host enjoyed was carrot cake.\
Now, carrot cake is one of those desserts that has binary appeal. You either like it, or you dislike it. It also has some strong lovers who fight for carrot cake’s honour.
I fall on the “like” side, especially if it’s fresh, gingery, and has a thick frosting.
If you plot carrot cake on a chart of average level of affinity vs popularity, it would likely be in the middle. However, that single point gives very little information on the distribution of preferences. If you were instead to plot just linearly all of the affinity of the sample, you’d see the two extremes emerge. In this case, more information (mean affinity vs mean popularity) has led to less clarity for decision making. If you were a baker, you’d likely say “no thanks” — I’m just going to bake the top right quadrant of affinity vs popularity. However, you’d miss the extremist element of the carrot cake market.
If you want to make average cakes for average consumers as a baker, that’s one thing. However, with high rent and low traffic in many places, you’ll likely want to attract the extremists and diehards who are willing to go across town or pay high delivery costs to try your carrot cake.
