In the Western politics, we often see that although different parties have different political preferences, their policy proposals have more similarities than differences, this is because when they want to win the support from the majority, they have to set their proposals that match the preference of the median of the entire population. In addition, the wisdom of crowds suggests that when we ask a very random question, one individual is highly unlikely to deliver the correct answer, but if we ask a large number of people this question, the mean of their answers is very close to the correct answer. There is a story that when the US Navy lost a submarine, the Defence Department asked all its employees their opinions about the location of this submarine, then the navy used the mean of all the answers as the starting point to start their search. In the market, when there are only two companies to compete, it is their best strategies to set their products' preferences to match the preference of the median of the customers and split the market evenly.
However, matching the median is not necessarily always the best strategy. Although the preference tends to match a normal distribution, the wealth distribution does not match the normal distribution. This is why many companies specifically target wealthy customers rather than ordinary customers that they want to use quality to beat quantity. There is one problem about there is a cap about how much the wealthy customers are willing to purchase. The wealthy customers are not stupid that they are not going to spend their entire wealth on consumption. Nowadays, the companies that have the highest market values are those have larger market shares in the markets that are highly active (not seasonal).
To conclude, being median is not the only strategy available; however, being median is the strategy that leads to the potential overall best.
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