Say ‘above average’ out loud and it sounds like a shrug — faint praise, the compliment you give when there is nothing more specific to say.
That is a language problem, not a strategy problem. Being genuinely, meaningfully above the baseline in something you care about — clearly better than most people who touch the same task, hobby, or skill — is a real and difficult achievement. It just does not come with a trophy shape, so it reads as smaller than it is.
The actual claim is this: most of the value in almost anything is captured well before you reach the absolute best. The jump from mediocre to genuinely good is enormous. The jump from genuinely good to the objective best in the world is usually much smaller, and usually costs far more than the first jump did, for a shrinking return.
A brand — or a person — built around ‘above average’ is making a bet about where that curve bends, and choosing to stop investing right around the bend instead of chasing all the way to the flat, expensive tail past it. That is not a smaller ambition. It is a more efficient one.