Starbucks

By JoshPetersel in Josh for Business 3 Comments

I’ve been reading a fair amount on Starbucks’ new logo identity commemorating their 40 years of business (See Brand New’s take here, and here).

The guys over there are exceedingly good at discussing the elements of branding. How this is an evolution, how there were extraneous elements, etc. Not to belittle those points—I’m just not good at talking about them, and besides, if you read the links above, I’ve got nothing to add to the discussion.

However, two points were gently mentioned and somewhat glazed over:

  1. The logo went from two colors to one.
  2. There’s no more text.

Okay, so there’s an upfront cost that signage on stores and stuff are going to have to be updated. That’s a given.

But here’s the big win: Think about how much easier and cheaper it’s going to be for Starbucks to print everything. From now on, every single cup that’s manufactured only needs one color of ink. (Coming from a guy whose business depends on printing, this is a huge deal.) And every single coffee bag, and every single tote bag, and every single one of those cardboard-ey things that they put around the cup so you don’t burn your hand. (Do those have a name? Is it a holder?) The store signage gets printed and updated once. The cups are manufactured millions (zillions?) of times.

Further, from now on, they don’t need separate print runs for Starbucks locations in other countries. Or at least (since a Google Image search for “German Starbucks Coffee” didn’t result in “Starbucks Kaffee” logos) the branding in every country around the globe will make sense and won’t be hindered by English letters.

A++ work.

Opt Outs

By JoshPetersel in Josh for Business 0 Comment

In the most recent issue of new St. Louis free mag, Town & Style:

What I read under the header “Distribution”:

We already assumed based on your home address from the list we purchased that you’d like this. If you don’t, too bad. You’re going to have to read this magazine, find small print, and then jump through hurdles to remove yourself from our circulation.

Probably wouldn’t bother me so much if there were options here. Nothing here says “If you like this, we’ll deliver it straight to your house!” That seems strange. Reeks of spam, and reeks of some crazy legal policy like “you’re allowed to send this stuff to folks without their consent, as long instructions to opt out appear somewhere.”

This makes me =(

relevant.

Printers

By JoshPetersel in Josh for Business 0 Comment

Let’s not sugarcoat anything here: Printers are, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the black hole of the entire technological industry. Nothing else comes close to the printer community’s collective display of incompetency.

Nowhere else is there ever any glimmer of a doubt about communication between electronic devices—much less ones that are hardwired to each other. You never have to unplug and re-plug your power cord into the wall four times because your laptop doesn’t recognize the outlet. Your flash drive doesn’t have to upload a test document every time you connect. Your mouse doesn’t have only one button that sometimes means power, sometimes means reset, sometimes means I’m ready for side two, and sometimes means Chance Time! depending on when or how hard you press it. Your external hard drive has no problem understanding when you need to stop a file transfer, and doesn’t go completely bonkers any time you hit the cancel button, or attempt to transfer the file anyway the next time you plug the drive in to anything.

You’ll probably hear those sorts of complaints about anywhere. In fact, CollegeHumor made an incredibly accurate cartoon about the whole situation.

But here’s a new bit of criticism I’d like to add to the mix: it is quite nearly impossible to buy a printer that fits the specifications of what you’d like it to do.

Buying an external hard drive is simple: it’s got a certain amount of space (Gigabytes or Terabytes) and can store a correlated (and easily calculable) number of documents or files. If you’re picky, you can pick whether you want a USB 2.0 cord (pretty fast) or USB 3.0 cord (really fast).

As for printers:

  1. Honest to goodness, I don’t care that one printer can spew out 120 pages per minute while its competitor can only muster 110. If I’m looking to do 100 documents a minute, I’m probably not in the market for a printer that’s under $100. (Further, I should probably think about loosening up my schedule.)
  2. I don’t care that the printer is wireless. More than most anything else electronic, I’m okay with my printer being wired. The overarching premise of printing is that I need something on my computer to be in my hands—I don’t want it far away from me! And further, given all the other headaches printers have, why would I want to add network connectivity to the list of foreseeable problems?
  3. I don’t need to scan, and I don’t need to photocopy, and I don’t need to receive faxes. I want a printer. Your frivolous bells and whistles do not amuse me.
  4. Most of all, why, for the life of me, is it so damn near impossible to find an honest explanation of how many printed pages I’ll get out of one ink cartridge? And not under the circumstances where my first 60 documents only use Cyan, and my next 60 only use Magenta, and my next 60 only use Yellow, and I’m using the impossible-to-find Express Settings which drain less ink. If I know that I print about 30 documents per month, I think it’s entirely reasonable that you tell me approximately how often I’ll need to come back and buy more ink—or if I’m better off buying $0.30 a page prints at my local FedEx.

I tried printing this article, but the printer couldn’t decide whether the printer door was open or there was a paper jam.

Relevant (NSFW language)

“WARNING: SMOKING ALLOWED HERE”

By JoshPetersel in Josh and the Arts, Josh for Business 2 Comments

St. Louis recently went under a city-wide smoking ban, which, naturally, comes with enough policies, guidelines, restrictions, quandaries, and political minutiae to skin a cat. I don’t know how many protocols that is. But figuring that guidelines and procedures rarely have sharp edges, one must assume it’s a lot.

Here’s one of the stipulations I find particularly enjoyable:

smoking allowed here

“WARNING: SMOKING ALLOWED HERE”

I first spotted this sign at DB’s in Soulard, and figured it to be a fairly clever tongue-in-cheek joke. “Warning,” in the event that it wasn’t clear before to smokers and non-smokers alike that smoking is dangerous. Ironic, because anyone planning on going to DB’s—a not-quite-but-almost-topless bar—should really have more immediate and visual worries than second-hand smoke. But primarily because smokers, especially, like to sneer in the face of that danger and authority. Be careful, smokers, you’ll actually have an opportunity to enjoy yourselves here!

Then I found out that these signs are mandatory. And according to one bar owner, the rules are very specific: ALL CAPS (cruise control), Arial font, plain black and white, clearly visible, etc.

Whoever’s in charge of making these policies clearly doesn’t get it. And it’s been the same guy for decades. He’s also responsible for:

As well as:

Aren’t you frightened?

Frankly, I’m (not a smoker, but theoretically) happier to light up a cigarette knowing that the man thinks it’s bad for my health, just as I was happier listening to alubms with lyrics that I suspected would make my parents’ blood boil.

And the deliciously ironic twist: signs like these have a history of effecting the opposite of the intended result. They’ve made more than one movie out of it. Every bar owner I’ve spoken to has cited better business since the stipulation-enforced ban—except for one, whose size to food served ratio requires them to ban smokers and either send them outside or to any of the four smaller bars down and across the street who pass under the smoking ban’s radar. Last I heard, they’re jostling with the area behind the bar, which can sometimes be considered walking space, and sometimes be considered storage space. If they get it just right, their ratio will go down, and they’ll be able to appeal.

So now, instead of bar/restaurants having a smoking section off to the side, the smoking section is now perched out right at the front door as I walk in. I bet concerned soccer moms couldn’t be happier. Mission accomplished?

“Banning” something from a rebel doesn’t work.

(PS – here’s how SouthPark dealt with rebels.)

 

Netflix

By JoshPetersel in Josh for Business 2 Comments

What with all the social networking going around on the internet these days…

1) I want to recommend a movie to my parents. Why doesn’t Netflix have a “recommend” button?

2) Why haven’t I been given the option to “friend” my parents (or anyone else) on Netflix in the first place?

3) Netflix seems to have a solid algorithm for recommending new movies for me based on my viewing history. Given (2), why can’t I view my parents’ recommendations? Or better, a list of suggestions for movies we’d both like?

The Interstate

By JoshPetersel in Josh for Business 0 Comment

With trips to Manchester, Tennessee; Bloomington, Indiana; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Louisville, Kentucky; Nashville and Memphis, Tennessee; and more, it’s safe to say I’ve done more than my fair share of cross-country road travel this year.

Through all my hours of driving experience, I’ve noticed this: The interstate never seems to travel in a straight line. Nor does it ever seem to move exactly East-West. Some might chalk this up to improper measuring equipment, or a need to maneuver around natural landscape. But I wonder if, in fact, highways were designed that way so that you’d never have to stare directly into a sunrise or sunset for a prolonged period of time. How many accidents might this avoid in a year? Hmm.

On the other hand: Gravois Avenue—the bane of my St. Louis driving existence—is absolutely, positively intolerable around 7:00pm summertime, 4:30pm winter. Not that I find it any more enjoyable at any other time of day.

Re: How I’d Fix the Islanders

By JoshPetersel in Josh for Business, Josh plays Sports 0 Comment

A followup to 2008’s How I’d Fix the Islanders, after a visit to Nassau Coliseum over Thanksgiving Break this year.

Girls: The Ice Breakers are gone. Good riddance. The Ice Girls are still around, but as they’re tasked with cleaning up the ice during commercial breaks, at least they’re functional.

T-Shirts: The T-shirt Tommy Gun is gone, but the tee overabundance remains. I caught a shirt during the first intermission, bringing our family total to three tees in the past two games.

Polite Ushers: The ushers didn’t bother us. We bought four tickets at face value, and one in the nosebleeds. To no one’s surprise, there was no problem seating all five of us together down in the lower levels.

That said, pricing on said one general admission nosebleed seats hovered around $40. That’s the cheapest ticket in a half-empty stadium? Maybe someone’s gotten wise to the fact that folks are just going to come in and sit wherever they please.

New “Goal!” Cheer: It’s different again this year. Still incomprehensible. Better than ’08’s “Hey, you suck!” What the heck was wrong with Rock & Roll pt. 2?

Free Chili: It worked, I guess. Folks in our section were legitimately excited about the Isles scoring a third goal. Too bad we only won 2-0 and snapped a 14-game losing streak. I think everyone left disappointed.

Victory Plan: Haven’t seen any word of it. Too bad; I thought this idea was brilliant.

Tailgating, fighting gloves, tagging the visiting team’s best player: No word, yet. But I mean, I don’t know if it’s wholly reasonable to expect the Islanders to keep tabs on the best blog on the whole entire internet.

///

Now, onto some new business:

Door Prizes: Every now and again, just after passing through the stadium gates at a sporting event, you’ll be greeted with a promotional freebie – a hat, umbrella, keychain, whatever. I’ve actually once received a full-size Louisville Slugger at a Mets Game. As for the Islanders? I walked in and was immediately handed a 4×6 ad flyer for electronics at PC Richard. Yuck.

T-Shirts: Seems to me that the only time anyone’s motivated to stand up and cheer is once the t-shirt launchers are on the rink. Why not shoot them off after goals?

WiFi: Several times throughout the game, the Jumbotron ran ads for Optimium Wifi, excitedly explaining that you could connect your smartphone or laptop to available free wifi during the game. Really? Who’s bringing their laptop to games? And we’re encouraging this?

Mass Transit: This one’s a biggie.

How are you supposed to get to an Islanders game if you don’t have a car? This only occurred to me last game after a year and a half of experience driving all over St. Louis, or taking public transit whenever I needed to. What if you don’t want to drive? Or pay $10 for parking? (By the way—$10 for parking?)

I did some basic internet research, and found this quote from a Nassau Coliseum Yelp review:

Getting there EVEN FROM MANHATTAN, is like the plot to the Steve Martin + John Candy classic: Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. 1) Subway to Penn Station, 2) LIRR to Hempstead, 3) N70 to outside the arena, 4) 1/4 mile walk to arena. Really? Am I in Cleveland yet?

Some follow-up research on Google Maps suggests that the transit from Penn Station to the Coliseum will take between 1.5-2 hours each way. Why would anyone living in the downtown NYC Metro area ever consider going to an Islanders game instead of a Rangers game?

You’re a thirty or forty minute drive east of perhaps the biggest hive of sports fanatics in the western world, and it’s nigh impossible for any of them to show up for a game. What a disaster. Why not set up a bus service from downtown direct to the coliseum? How hard and how expensive could that be? Getting people to the game has to be about as important as putting on a good show once they get there, no?

I can’t think of any other professional sports team that has this problem. Granted, I’ve never visited the Columbus Blues Jackets. But I mean, the Memphis Grizzlies are a few minutes’ walk away from Beale Street. The Cardinals, Blues, and Rams are all in the heart of downtown St. Louis. The Cubs and WhiteSox each have their own stops labelled on the metro line. The Mets are reasonably far out from downtown NY, but New Shea Stadium is right on the 7 line, and the team actively promotes taking the train during every game.

I know there’s currently a big movement pushing for the Islanders to get a new arena. I hope they keep the mass transit-ers in mind.

(I wonder if I’m going to end up working for a transit company once I grow up. I keep finding problems here that seem to have easy solutions. They pay money for fixing stuff like this, right?)

Jerseys: From my post on the Pittsburgh Steelers:

Maybe 95% of the Pittsburghians fans wear a black (home) jersey. Even the Steelers’ 3rd Jersey is black & gold in color. Everyone wears black and gold. The result is overwhelming—for opposing teams, and for any poor fans who aren’t part of the tribe yet. It’s as if you’ve got to buy a jersey as a prerequisite for buying a ticket.

On the other hand, maybe (generously) 15% of the fans at the Islanders game show up in uniform. Dad’s comfortable wearing an Islanders windbreaker, Zach’s in street clothes. Mom and I are in uniform, but I’m wearing orange and she’s wearing blue.

I’ve already talked about how a uniform sea of uniforms (hah!) makes for a more intimidating environment for opponents. We could talk about how putting on your uniform psychologically amps you up for the game and ties you closer to the team. So instead, how about we drive jersey wears, jersey sales, and ticket sales all at once? How about a 10% discount on tickets to anyone wearing a uniform? Or, since that’d be hard to measure with online sales, a voucher given out at the door to anyone in jersey for 20% off their next game?

///

Maybe, someday, the Islanders will put together a team decent enough to keep my attention on the game and away from all of the marketing things they could be doing better.

CollegeHumor

By JoshPetersel in Josh for Business, Josh surfs the Internet 1 Comment

An interesting case study (could you call it that?) on how a brand and product ages with the passage of time: www.collegehumor.com . Feels like I’ve been a fan for a thousand years—I think my first memory of the site was this video.  Though it’s ironic, and a sign of both my and the site’s age, that I can’t manage to find the on-site version.

CollegeHumor has evolved with time into a much different monster today than it was back then. And with good reason. Streaming video wasn’t really universal—or even all that realistic—back when the website launched in 1999. You couldn’t create content that parodied Facebook before Facebook existed. But that’s not the interesting stuff.

What’s interesting to me is that CollegeHumor is very slowly and sneakily becoming less and less of a college-based humor website. For now, much of the content still applies to collegiates.  But if you look closely, you’d notice that much of site’s original content—video series such as “Hardly Working,” “Full Benefits,” “Phantom of the Office,” and even their (arguably) most popular series, “Jake and Amir”—are all office-based comedies.

CollegeHumor is (or at least, soon will be) faced with a difficult dilemma: the staff is getting old; as good as they’ve been at putting it off, Father Time always manages to make his rounds. Already, you don’t really see the once readily-available vulgar language, drug abuse, or nudity on the site anymore—and it’d be impossible to argue that these aren’t significant facets of collegiate life. In fact, according to their Media Kit, you’re not even allowed to advertise on any pages that feature content of that nature.

What could you do? As CollegeHumor, you couldn’t create classroom-based sketch comedies with a staff that’s probably largely 5+ years removed from being in college, or else you’d fast run into an authenticity problem. You couldn’t cycle your personnel as they age,  or else you’re faced with a staffing nightmare—and plus, you lose out on all the branding and loyalty developed by your current team. Very risky.

For now, the characters, sketches, and content created are all still relatable to anyone in the pre-, current-, and post-collegiate demographics.  But how long until CollegeHumor.com becomes OfficeHumor.com—either in effect, or in execution?

I think CollegeHumor has taken the right path. Keeping old customers is far easier than capturing and nurturing new ones; that’s not rocket science. And for now, that means that the website and content have to age accordingly. I’ll be interested to see if and when the website reaches a true breaking point where it’s largely irrelevant for the current crop of collegiates.  The creation of other assets that aren’t tied to a stagnant age demographic, such as sister sites Dorkly.com, TodaysBigThing.com, and BustedTees.com, was an absolute must—and I think they’ve managed to successfully leverage the popularity of CollegeHumor into the development of the rest of the CH Media product portfolio.

Eleven may face a similar predicament in the near future / today / last year. Does the magazine grow up with its editors? Stay tuned.

Redbox

By JoshPetersel in Josh for Business 0 Comment

I read recently that Redbox is planning on introducing Video Game rentals to its kiosks.

If you’re unfamiliar, here’s the Redbox business model: Rent a movie for $1/night, put kiosks  in high-traffic locations to generate impulse buys.  And in all likelihood, bank on drunken fools to lose the disc before even getting home to watch the movie and charging them like $50 a pop (but hey, we all still love you, Danny).

Why this fails: the system doesn’t scale.  Movies, purportedly, you can watch in a single night.  The barter when I pick out my Redbox movie is only for a buck.  Videogames take a long, long time to complete. (Unless we’re talking Super Mario World.  I can actually do this in under 20 minutes.) Most modern games would take weeks for anyone with school or a day job.  And then, on top of that, Redbox plans on charging $2/night.  You’ve just gone from a $1 impulse to a $25 investment.

Here’s a curious idea, though: What if, anticipating that videogames will take twice as long to return, Redbox charged half as much? $4 for a week or so of play, maybe I could stomach.  Maybe further, I’m more likely to forget about the game for an extra twenty seven days while charges continue to pile.