Dear Reader,
In this week's newsletter, you'll read about YouTube's big announcement, a new book about the history and future of disruption, how Chipotle landed on the most on-trend marketing strategy today, why so many brands are rethinking self-checkout and bonus stories about mapping a fruit fly brain, buying Canadian and why dating apps are being replaced by mahjong.
Enjoy the stories this week and stay curious!
Rohit
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This Week's New Videos ...
YouTube's Big Announcement Might Change How Everyone Shops
If you're a fan of the YouTube rabbit hole, managing your screen time might get a little harder. At the Made on YouTube event this past week, the platform made several announcements for features that will change the experience of browsing videos and perhaps the way many products are evaluated and purchased too:
Soon, you can design your own unique homepage feeds using conversational prompts like "Witty podcasts for my daily 30-minute commute," “Evening wind down with long documentaries,” or "Help me discover new DIY creators," tailored to whatever mood or interest you like. You can save multiple custom feeds to your home screen that update automatically with fresh recommendations. We’re also expanding Ask YouTube to be your product recommendation guide, and introducing new ways to explore your favorite artist or discover new podcasts for your commute.
As part of this announcement, the product recommendation guide aspect could become a game changer in many ways. For me, every time I'm making a more considered purchase such as a 4K camera for my home office or a full function espresso machine - I already turn to YouTube videos. Creators there help compare various products, do extensive reviews and offer their expertise on demand. Usually, the process involves creating my own playlist and saving or sharing multiple videos to compare. Now YouTube is making that process more seamless, and it could transform the relative importance of influencer marketing as a key element of how certain products are discovered and sold.
In addition, the idea that custom homepages can be generated by mood or topic means that videos uploaded to YouTube will need to be extensively optimized to ensure they show up on these user-generated, curated homepages. If you're a big YouTube user, do you like these changes and will you use them? Hit reply and let me know.
Chipotle Has Figured Out the Marketing Strategy of the Future
This isn't exactly a new playbook, but Chipotle launched a new campaign where they invite 100 influencers into their kitchens at locations across the US to see how the food gets made and create their own videos. The predictable tagline is all about how their "real" food has nothing to hide. At the same time, Burger King is heavily promoting their "new" chicken nuggets made with 100% white meat (maybe don't ask what they were made of before). Meanwhile Arby's is promoting their steak nuggets as more real because they don't come in "silly shapes." This war to declare themselves as more real than their competitors may be playing out among QSR restaurants right now, but it's a fight that will soon extend to many other industries as well.
As consumers feel more overwhelmed by the fake and overly processed, the battle to be a brand that is more real, authentic and human continues to be more fundamental. Now that the submissions are rolling in for this judging season of the Non-Obvious Book Awards, I am seeing this same trend echoed in multiple books. It's becoming so common that I'm thinking about creating a compilation of campaigns around this topic and publishing a bigger roundup. For that, I'd love to know if you have seen campaigns or initiatives in other industries like this that might be worth adding to the list. Let me know!
The Rethinking of Self-Checkout and the Tech Optimism Cycle
There are some predictable problems with self-checkout and they generally aren't from consumers. Of course, some people are concerned about the job losses that this automation has created, and when something goes wrong, not having a human cashier available can be inconvenient. The bigger problem may be "shrink" - which is the industry term for people basically stealing stuff (or forgetting to scan items or thinking they scanned them when they didn't). Self-checkout makes all of that easier to do. So, it's not surprising that a handful of retailers are cutting back on self-checkout kiosks and rehiring human cashiers. This is a shift that has been slowly increasing over the past two years.
This evolution is a perfect metaphor for what we are likely to see happen (or perhaps are already seeing) when it comes to the adoption of other forms of technology within teams and organizations. There is an optimism from senior leaders fueled by a tempting spreadsheet analysis that illustrates savings compounding over time. Executives underestimate what negative repercussions these shifts will have and move ahead with expensive retrofitting anyway. Over time, that "all in" philosophy proves to be flawed, and a scaling back takes place, at which point people get rehired and the business comes back to the fundamentals that made them successful in the first place. There's probably a framework someone has already developed and named for this cycle, right?
