Apple Store in NYC

One of the things that’s really sunk in in my first few months as a Planner is that the answers you get aren’t that important if you’re not already asking the right questions.

So here’s a question to keep in mind:

Do you have a product or service people will wait in line for? If not, why? What can we do, as Planners, to change behavior and give people a reason to give us some of their precious time?

I got the idea for this post this past weekend when I decided to try Kogi BBQ. Kogi is notorious for long lines; I’ve heard of people waiting as long as two hours for their food!!

Great food, bad pic

Anyway, the following video gives us two main reasons people wait in line:

1) People over-estimate the value of something when it’s free

2) People want to be 1st to see or do something that’s is considered cool

Well, Kogi and lots of other products aren’t free, but the second reason is a little more relevant.

Going a step further, I think one of the main reasons people will wait in line when they don’t really have to is for the story (of course, herd mentality and fanboy-ism can also be at play). And a story is greater than any product or service because it can last way beyond the point of sale.

In a product life cycle, the purchase is a short, fleeting moment. The anticipation, the excitement and everything else leading up to that moment are what create lasting memories for people. So much so that I’m still talking about a lunch I had at Kogi two days ago and not the breakfast I had at home this morning.

You can see lines like this just about any day at In-N-Out Burger, as well as in midtown NYC at Shake Shack, but the real challenge isn’t what happens when people form a line for you — it’s what they do when the line is gone.

Further reading/viewing:

Apple’s iPhone 4 Hits Stores Thursday

Crowds Queue Up Around U.S. For iPhone 4

How Long Would You Wait In Line for Food?

The Psychology of Waiting Lines

What I’m Reading: The Culting of Brands

I’m struggling to remember the last time I didn’t finish a book, but after getting almost 100 pages into
“Motorcycle Maintenance” I just gave up. Couldn’t help it. All the philosophical nonsense had my mind going in circles and I lost patience.

Even so, I did pick up a few good quotes & passages that I wanted to share:

On classifying people: “Cliches and stereotypes such as ‘beatnik’ or ‘hippie’ have been invented for the antitechnologists, the antisystem people, and will continue to be. But one does not convert individuals into mass people with the simple coining of  a mass term.” (emphasis mine) Pg.16

On over-analyzing: “When analytic thought, the knife, is applied to experience, something is always killed in the process. That is fairly well understood, at least in the arts. Mark Twain’s experience comes to mind, in which, after he had mastered the analytic knowledge needed to pilot the Mississippi River, he discovered the river had lost its beauty. Something is always killed. But what is less noticed in the arts — something is always created too. And instead of just dwelling on what is killed it’s important also to see what’s created and to see the process as a kind of death-birth continuity that is neither good nor bad, but just is.” (emphasis mine) Pgs.70-71

On systems: “To speak of certain government and establishment institutions as ‘the system’ is to speak correctly, since these organizations are founded upon the same structural conceptual relationships as a motorcycle. They are sustained by structural relationships even when they have lost all other meaning and purpose. People arrive at a factory and perform a totally meaningless task from eight to five without question because the structure demands that it be that way. There’s no villain, no ‘mean guy’ who wants them to live meaningless lives, it’s just that the structure, the system demands it and no one is willing to take on the formidable task of changing the structure just because it’s meaningless.

But to tear down a factory or to revolt against a government or to avoid repair of a motorcycle because it is a system is to attack effects rather than causes; and as long as the attack is upon effects only, no change is possible (emphasis mine). The true system, the real system, is our present construction of systematic thought itself, rationality itself, and if a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government. There’s so much talk about the system. And so little understanding.” Pgs.87-88

Wow – this book came out in 1974 but that last passage could have been written this year. General Motors, Microsoft and most recently BP are all good examples of institutions that will fail to change until they integrate new people with fresh ideas. Innovation has to come from the top. It doesn’t matter how smart, creative or talented your employees are when the leaders already have a rigid approach in place.

Look at Wall Street. One company falls apart. Guys regroup and form a new company. They’re still greedy & unethical. Nothing has really changed except for the name on the door so the cycle repeats itself.

People don’t change, so sometimes you need to change people.

###

Speaking of poor corporate culture, “Light Touch Key to Product Innovation” on WARC points to a Nielsen study that “…found that greater involvement among senior managers in the ideation and creation processes generally leads to launches that enjoy lower success rates.” Nice.

On the flip side, here’s Ed Cotton’s post on Amazon’s acquisition of Zappos, a company that champions culture: “Zappos and the Power of Soft Intangibles“

This weekend I was fortunate to be one of the lucky people in attendance at TEDxHollywood, “a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience.”

The event was held at the LA office of TBWA/CHIAT/DAY, which is basically the kind of cool, funky, creative environment where every ad guy and girl dreams of working.

An office park...literally

The event was organized by Creative Director Tito Melega, who said during his introduction (I’m paraphrasing) on the evening’s theme, Creativity In The New World: “Instead of creating stories people want to hear, we create stories people want to tell.”

The event moved forward with the first guest speaker, photographer Jay Mark Johnson, who creates stunning visuals through the use of what he calls “Space-time Photography.”

Next up was Rob Schwartz, Chief Creative Officer at TBWA/CHIAT/DAY who talked about some of the work that went into the Pepsi Refresh Project, an excellent case study for brands who want to behave as a tool for positive social change. What was really inspiring is the number of incredible ideas people submitted to the campaign: “There’s so much creative potential in this country coming from regular people.”

I loved when Rob showed us a messenger bag created from a billboard that was used doing the Refresh project. It was a great example of a brand using their marketing to literally create something in line with the campaign message. He closed with this Behance-esque quote.

IDEAS WORTH SHARING —> IDEAS WORTH DOING

Mark was followed by singer/songwriter Elizaveta, who pretty much left everyone floored during her performance with her amazing voice. You can download four free tracks here.

The last presenter of the night was Tears For Fears co-founder Curt Smith, who talked about how social media has changed both the music industry and how he behaves as a musician. The key takeaway for me was when Curt said, “I don’t HAVE to record an ALBUM.” He’s realized that the album format is inefficient and outdated, something Bob Lefsetz has been saying for some time now: people nowadays prefer cherry-picking their favorite tracks over buying albums.

Looking back, I’m incredibly grateful to have been a part of this experience. I met some terrific people and I think that it’s great Tito was able to gather such a colorful group of presenters to educate, entertain and inspire us for a short evening — pretty much everything I could ask for in a TED event.

LINKS:

Check out my full Flickr set here

TED X Hollywood Tweet Stream

I wrote about “Into Thin Air” last month and finally got around to finishing it the other day. There’s a few things I learned that I wanted to share:

1) It’s cold as hell

The summit of Everest is 29, 028 feet. To give you an idea how high that is, most commercial planes fly around 30,000-40,000 feet (the air is thinner, therefore, more fuel efficient).

“…searched for a protected place to escape the wind, but there was nowhere to hide. Everyone’s oxygen had long since run out, making the group more vulnerable to the windchill, which exceeded a hundred below zero.”

100 degrees below zero!! Unreal. I felt -7 one time in Boston and I couldn’t imagine being outside when it’s an extra 100 degrees colder.

2) You climb at night

I never thought of this before, but time is a major issue. Your body needs to get acclimated to the different altitude levels and it needs to do so periodically but quickly. If you stay at a high altitude for too long, your body can’t handle it, kind of like deep sea diving but on a massive mountain.

These mountaineers climb at night with headlamps (with severe storms your visibility can be reduced to just a few feet) in order to keep moving.

3) Getting to the summit is the easy part

“Reaching the top of Everest is supposed to trigger a surge of intense elation; against all odds, after all, I had just attained a goal I’d coveted since childhood. But the summit was really only the halfway point. Any impulse I might have felt toward self-congratulation was extinguished by overwhelming apprehension about the long, dangerous descent that lay ahead.”

I know this may sound obvious, but before reading this book I thought of climbing to the top of the mountain as the end goal — it’s not. Getting back down is even more difficult: you’re incredibly fatigued, you run the risk of running out of oxygen in your tank (most people carry oxygen tanks because it’s so hard to breathe in the high altitude) and the cold temperature creates all sorts of problems. Once you get to the top it’s basically a race against time.

Mountaineering, in some ways reminds me of martial arts. It’s a small club of people and it’s hard to explain to outsiders exactly why you do it; why you put yourself through the physical pain time and time again.

Krakauer’s got a nice take on it:

“I’d always known that climbing mountains was a high-risk pursuit. I accepted that danger was an essential component of the game — without it, climbing would be little different from a hundred other trifling diversions. It was titillating to brush up against the enigma of mortality, to steal a glimpse across its forbidden frontier. Climbing was a magnificent activity, I firmly believed, not in spite of the inherent perils, but precisely because of them.”

I’ll say it again: this is a great adventure book. Totally worth your time.

UPDATE: 4/23/10

LINKS: HistoryShots Conquest of Mount Everest

Mount Everest Climbing Photos

I wish there was a version of this video for self-appointed Social Media Experts.

Apparently , this “…study demonstrates that experiential purchases, such as a meal out or theater tickets, result in increased well-being because they satisfy higher order needs, specifically the need for social connectedness and vitality — a feeling of being alive.”

Makes sense. Most people are social by nature, so it seems logical that if forced to choose one or another, we’d rather be doing things with people than by ourselves, despite our accumulation of material possessions.

In other words, no matter how bad-ass this new Porsche 918 Spyder is, it’d be a lot more fun with some company.

Porsche 918 Spyder

Image “Porsche 918 Spyder concept is the most beautiful hybrid we’ve ever seen“

“Not since the Beach Boys were in peach fuzz and crew cuts has it been so safe to live and play in the City of Angels. Believe it: you are more likely to be murdered in Columbus, Ohio, or Tulsa, Okla., than in the nation’s second most populous city.” — via Marginal Revolution “Los Angeles Fact of the Day“

So I got that goin’ for me, which is nice.

Luckily for me, I’ll be driving through Columbus, OH; Tulsa, OK; and even sunny St. Louis when I move. Better keep the windows rolled up just in case:

Image here

At last.

I’ve had a long job search — a really long job search. But I have great news.

Today I accepted an offer to join Casanova Pendrill, a Hispanic Advertising agency in Orange County, CA, as a Strategic Planner.

There’s a scene towards the end of the Will Smith movie “The Pursuit of Happyness” after he’s just been offered a job, walks outside the office and claps his hands together as he walks through a crowd of people, elated about his accomplishment. It’s not just the fact that he was able to find a job. It’s that he was able to overcome all the adversity he faced through perseverance. Incredible perseverance and an ability to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

That’s how I’m feeling right now.

In early 2008, I made the decision to leave my company and carve out another path for myself. It’s taken two years to get here. And it took a lot in between — soul searching, going back to school, working here and there – to get to this point.

I’ve thought about that scene a lot of times in the past 24 months or so.

It’s a tough thing to switch careers. It’s even tougher as you get older.

Why?

Because of all the excuses you give yourself. And none of them hold any water. These are limiting beliefs.

What did I do? I figured out where I was (Point A). Then I decided where I wanted to be (Point B). Then I figured out the steps I would need to take to get from A to B.

A to B isn’t usually a straight line, is it? This is where most people quit. This is what Seth Godin calls “The Dip.” It’s your mind giving up on you.

Image Seth’s Blog

I don’t claim to have all the answers, but I know there are lots of people out of work right now, and if you’re one of them, you need to get the negativity out of your head. Stop blaming the economy, or the market, or anything else. In the end, it’s all up to you.

And in the end…there’s “Happyness.”

Christopher Gardner: Hey. Don’t ever let somebody tell you… You can’t do something. Not even me. All right?
Christopher: All right.
Christopher Gardner: You got a dream… You gotta protect it. People can’t do somethin’ themselves, they wanna tell you you can’t do it. If you want somethin’, go get it. Period.

O.K. – I’ll stop preaching now

I started reading Jon Krakauer’s book “Into Thin Air” on my flight to LA last week. Apparently there was a TV movie made about this story back in 1997, but I don’t remember ever seeing it.

I’m about halfway through the book now. It’s just a really, really good story. I like how Krakauer starts off each chapter with a quote from another book on mountaineering. Here’s one from Chapter 7:

“But there are men for whom the unattainable has a special attraction. Usually they are not experts; their ambitions and fantasies are strong enough to brush aside the doubts which more cautious men might have. Determination and faith are their strongest weapons. At best such men are regarded as eccentric; at worst, mad…

Everest has attracted its share of men like these. Their mountaineering experience varied from none at all to very slight — certainly none of them had the kind of experience which would make an ascent of Everest a reasonable goal. Three things they all had in common: faith in themselves, great determination, and endurance.” —Walt Unsworth, Everest

“Into Thin Air” has a lot of elements that make it a great adventure story. For me, it’s about the strength of the human spirit and persistence; moving forward one step at a time as you get incrementally closer to your goal.

“Though the company is privately held and does not respond to questions about its finances, it is evident that craigslist earns stupendous amounts of cash. One recent report, from a consulting firm that counted the paid ads, estimates that revenue could top $100 million in 2009. Should craigslist ever be sold, the price likely would run into the billions. Newmark, by these lights, is a very rich man. When anybody reminds him of this, the craigslist founder says there is nothing he would care to do with that much money, should it ever come into his hands. He already has a parking space, a hummingbird feeder, a small home with a view, and a shower with strong water pressure. What else is he supposed to want?”

It gets better:

“Newmark’s claim of almost total disinterest in wealth dovetails with the way craigslist does business. Besides offering nearly all of its features for free, it scorns advertising, refuses investment, ignores design, and does not innovate. Ordinarily, a company that showed such complete disdain for the normal rules of business would be vulnerable to competition, but craigslist has no serious rivals. The glory of the site is its size and its price. But seen from another angle, craigslist is one of the strangest monopolies in history, where customers are locked in by fees set at zero and where the ambiance of neglect is not a way to extract more profit but the expression of a worldview.

The axioms of this worldview are easy to state. “People are good and trustworthy and generally just concerned with getting through the day,” Newmark says. If most people are good and their needs are simple, all you have to do to serve them well is build a minimal infrastructure allowing them to get together and work things out for themselves. Any additional features are almost certainly superfluous and could even be damaging.”

I’m always interested in reading about business models and their perceived strengths/weaknesses. No matter how I look at it, I always come back to the same conclusion: businesses that succeed today are successful because they provide their customers value.