Campbell on Branding and Innovation

My path to the Institute of Design

Today is the second day of the Fall recruitID, where great companies from all over attend. It’s a fantastic opportunity for students to meet with companies and design consultancies. One question I’ve been asked during interviews is how I ended up at ID. I have been meaning to write on this every since Jamey commented on this blog a few weeks ago.

Jamey wrote:

“Jon - 
David Armano turned me on to your blog. I'm facing the same dilemma it seems you have gone through. I'm considering the my career and agree that design is key to the future of business for innovation and development. I've been exploring MBA versus MDes and will be looking at the MDM program you're involved with. As a fellow Milwaukeean, it looks like Chicago is the location that is leading the way via IIT or Kellogg to achieve that type of education.
I'll be curious to follow your posts and get a better idea of how you reached the decision to go the MDM route and what you feel the future value for you and your career will be.”

So I thought I would share my “journey” to the world of design thinking. Here it goes.

I was working at Cramer-Krasselt as an ad account executive in 2004. At the time, the agency was working on a lot of TV and print and I felt there had to be better ways to engage people than shouting to them through TV spots and cluttered magazines. Media fragmentation was making “mass” media less massive and as you know it’s only getting worse. The end was coming for the Advertising Industrial Complex.

I was working on the WD-40 Company account and we were doing some fantastic work on their core hardware products – WD-40, Lava and 3-IN-One oil. Starting with a clean slate, we went from ideation sessions and concept evaluation to ethnographic research, prototyping through marketing communications program execution. It was incredible! We developed with WD-40 the Smart Straw, solving the number one customer complaint of losing the little red straw, the Lava Pro line and 3-IN-One Professional. There was nothing that got me jazzed like walking through a Lowe’s or Home Depot and seeing a customer putting a product I helped bring to life into their shopping cart.

I came across Seth Godin’s Purple Cow in the Fall of 2004 which helped generate more interest for me. If you haven’t read it, the premise is largely based on the idea that you can’t just yell out marketing messages about a product anymore. You have to build the marketing into the product, make it remarkable from the start.

I got the opportunity to join Harley-Davidson and felt that working on the client side for a while would give me the opportunity to implement some of this thinking since I would be looking at the full business rather than just touching the marketing communications slice of the pie.

I kept reading and talking with people about design and innovation and then in Spring 2006 attended the Wisconsin Innovates conference where Tom Peters was the keynote speaker. During a breakout session I asked Tom, a frequent critic of MBA programs, what his thoughts were on going back to school for an MBA, for design or to keep working. His recommendation was to stay in the workforce and do something remarkable or, if I wanted to go back to school, that something unique like design would be the way to go because you learn to approach problems differently and find solutions in other ways.

That sealed it for me. Here are Tom and I after the breakout session. Kinda cool I got a picture with him. I'm on the left. :)

I had read an article about ID by Bruce Nussbaum in BusinessWeek the year before and started researching schools that taught design with business and only found a couple – ID and Roger Martin’s Rotman School of Management – that really intrigued me.

So it took me a year from talking to Tom Peters to get up the nerve to apply to ID and then take the risk of quitting my job to do something I was passionate about.

And it’s been so super worth it. I’ve been able to interview with companies and design consultancies that get it and have been doing this for years. They understand that all the touchpoints that have been ignored for decades while mass media was the focus are where you create and reinforce brands – product/service development, environments like retail locations, employee dress and signage, interactive, packaging, collateral. All based on insights derived from user-centered research.

So that's my long-winded story, what's yours? Were you always in design? Are you just now getting into it? Are you still in the exploration phase?

Akon and the Essence of Brands

While I’ve always appreciated the power of brands, working for Harley-Davidson brought that to a whole new level for me.

In the book Results-based Leadership a Harley-Davidson executive is quoted as saying, “What we sell is the ability for a 43-year-old accountant to dress in black leather, ride through small towns and have people be afraid of him.”

That’s a clever, simple statement but it’s so much more powerful than that. The passion goes beyond tattoos, leather and customized bikes. There is a community around the brand that is incredible as I luckily got to witness at a dozen rallies in the last couple of years. I don’t know of any other product that brings people together like Harley, where an attorney or investment banker can talk bikes with an hourly worker at Home Depot and any differences in class and status and attitude disappear. It’s just two guys talking about what they love, excitedly explaining about new pipes, a custom paint kit, or a great strip of road to ride.

The music I listen to covers a full range and I’ve been listening to Akon tonight while doing some schoolwork. Akon’s hooks are incredible. They grab you right away and get you tapping your foot.

A brand’s essence, the passion people feel about it, is the hook. Car designer Freeman Thomas, who created the Audi TT and the VW Beetle, said, "The Prowler makes you smile. Why? Because it’s focused. It has a plot, a reason for being, a passion."

So in thinking about your brand, ask what the hook is. If a potential customer comes across your brand will she or he start tapping their foot? Is it clear to them what your reason for being is? Are they into it right away? If not, the brand either has no reason for being or it's not (or no longer) being defined in terms they care about. And that can't be resolved with a bunch of ads. You have to dig in there, pull the song apart, rediscover why it was created to begin with, and then lay the track down again. Not easy but it's been done before.

Is your company leadership heart-healthy?

It’s human nature to be reactive, to have Won’t-Happen-To-Me syndrome. The overweight couch potato that doesn’t worry about heart disease. The 25-year-old who doesn’t need to start putting money into a 401k. The Fortune 500 company that doesn’t need to reinvent itself, its products, its processes.

There are people all over the country with a family history of heart disease, who don’t exercise, eat poorly, even smoke, who can be told over and over again by their doctors that they’re going to have a heart attack if they don't change and yet they do nothing.

I just got the new issue of Fast Company and the cover story by Clive Thompson is exciting and frightening. Exciting because a 37-year-old self-taught mechanic who dropped out of school after 7th grade is doing things with car engines that all the thousands of "professionals" in Detroit aren't. Frightening because a 37-year-old self-taught mechanic who dropped out of school after 7th grade is doing things with car engines that all the thousands of "professionals" in Detroit aren't.

Johnathan Goodwin is making super efficient, super powerful cars. He turned a Hummer into a vehicle that ran 700 miles on a tank of hydrogen while doubling horsepower and cutting fuel consumption in half. The Hummer can run on diesel, hydrogen, corn oil and more.

That’s absurd for a ton of reasons but primarily because GM, Ford and Chrysler have been sitting around reacting for 30 years, their executives telling each other they’re fine as they create incremental improvements on irrelevant products. And now they are in a fight for their lives due to overseas competition, boring product, archaic thinking (plus health-care obligations, etc.).

The article reads:

Indeed, Goodwin is doing precisely what the big American automakers have always insisted is impossible. They have long argued that fuel-efficient and alternative-fuel cars are a hard sell because they're too cramped and meek for our market. They've lobbied aggressively against raising fuel-efficiency and emissions standards, insisting that either would doom the domestic industry. Yet the truth is that Detroit is now getting squeezed from all sides.

It continues:

If the dream is a big, badass ride that's also clean, well, he's there already. As he points out, his conversions consist almost entirely of taking stock GM parts and snapping them together in clever new ways. "They could do all this stuff if they wanted to," he tells me, slapping on a visor and hunching over an arc welder. "The technology has been there forever. They make 90% of the components I use." He doesn't have an engineering degree; he didn't even go to high school: "I've just been messing around and seeing what I can do."

Hoover did the same thing. James Dyson peddled his invention to all the major vacuum cleaner manufacturers and none wanted it. Feedback included that that it was costly; that people didn’t care if the product looked good; that no one wanted to be able to see the dirt and grime being sucked up.

But this is the best part, Hoover and the rest of the industry make a ton on the bags they sell. In fact, this shining example of forward-thinking shows that even after the success of Dyson, human nature finds it hard to part ways with the old:

"I do regret that Hoover as a company did not take the product technology off Dyson; it would have lain on the shelf and not been used."
- Hoover's Vice President for Europe, Mike Rutter

Gotta keep that vacuum bag cash cow! Well, in a June USA Today article I read and posted on my office wall, these stats were shared on the upright vaccumm industry:

Would you rather have part of the $500 million bag market that will continue to become more and more irrelevant or a leading position in new industry technologies and a 25% share of the upright market at the fat profit margins Dyson generates?

And sure enough here comes Hoover expending all kinds of energy to make up ground. Doesn't this:

appear to be trying to look a lot like this:

Stupid Dyson, why can't he just stick to the rules the vacuum cleaner industry was playing by?

Here we are now, with telecoms getting pummeled by cable companies, Skype, Vonage, and soon Google.

The music industry is still trying to figure out how to put Napster back in the box.

TV is dealing with BitTorrent, Joost, Slingbox and DVRs.

You can see the same is happening for the car companies.

So what does an entrenched company have to do to innovate? To stay fresh? To start reinventing itself? Continuing my heart disease analogy, I figure you either:

a) Have company leadership that gets it and is already a healthy-eating, exercise addict.

b) Your company has a heart attack that’s mild enough to survive but frightening enough to jolt your leaders into eating better and taking the stairs more.

c) Like many Americans, there are plenty of companies that don't change their habits after a clutcher. They convince themselves it's heartburn.

Thing is, at the point you’re close to having a heart attack you don’t know if it's going to be fatal or not.

If it can happen to Hollywood, Ma Bell and Detroit, as big and all-American as it gets, then it sure as hell is going to happen to your industry too. I'm curious about the organizations you work for or clients you work with (you can keep the company names anonymous of course) - is leadership already eating well and exercising, are they eating their cheeseburgers on the couch watching American Idol, or was there a recent heart attack that forced them to decide to be proactive and start reinventing themselves before someone else does it for them?

P.S. There is an option D - quit your job and create something remarkable yourself, be the Johnathan Goodwin or James Dyson of some staid old industry.

And they're off...

Today’s the first day of B Session at ID. I had six classes in A Session but with the large number of big team projects going on I decided to take five classes this session:

Design Planning
Service Design as a Model for Business Design
Decision Making
Observing Users (semester-long class)
Design Planning Workshop (semester-long class)

I just had my first class for Design Planning taught by Larry Keeley, co-founder of Doblin, the innovation strategy consultancy. I have been super excited to take this class and Day 1 was right on.

Larry covered a bunch on the first day, talking about business planning and design, the field of innovation, the importance of professionalism and more, all in three hours that flew by.

Some quotes and insights he had include:

“I expect when you leave ID that you can go toe-to-toe with any CEO in the world and be confident in what you say.”

He explained that the challenge of planning is “to understand the future a bit sooner than everyone else.” This reminds me of the William Gibson quote, “The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet.” I guess that then means design planners get first dibs.

That what we’re learning at ID can help us understand “what human beings are going through now, finding things that make people’s lives less rewarding in order to get some insights so that relatively soon you can produce something astonishing.”

He talked about the field of innovation and how “design is now an imperative for competitiveness.” He continued, “I would love to be coming at your career now – no one conveniently handed me a framework kit; there weren’t terminology norms; there were no metrics and diagnostic tools. You are coming at the field when some of the basic field bed has been tilled for you. It (the field of innovation) will also become more crowded, increasing the need for personal professionalism. If we are lucky, you and me, you will be the vanguard of a new profession. I think you are at a really lucky time, mastering this topic.”

Rather than limiting this class to design planning frameworks and some examples/case studies, Larry appears to be planning to teach us more broadly - a new way of thinking and approaching problems; the importance of moving beyond "winging it" and to be confident in what you know and what you don't know; how to conduct yourself with a high level of professionalism; how to better interact with corporate decision makers.

How do you not leave that class jazzed about design planning, innovation and all the possibilities in the world?!

I’ll keep you posted on all my classes.

Google's Flawed Interruption Media Strategy

Google’s stock price hit $600 last week as the company continues to hit on all cylinders - search marketing dollars rolling in; acquisitions like DoubleClick and YouTube; a possible bid on UHF spectrum (here and here); etc. What can slow them down as they take over the world of media and advertising? Will they bring the same ad effectiveness to other media that they brought to search?

I have one idea, and it’s just an idea, but what if the thing that slows Google down is advertising itself, specifically the problems inherent with interruption media. As way of brief explanation for anyone who needs it, interruption media advertising is advertising based on the idea that a consumer is given entertainment, information, etc. and that is then interrupted to serve an ad to the audience, whether it’s a print ad in the middle of your Cat Fancy magazine article, a banner ad along the top of a CNN.com story or a TV spot during Grey’s Anatomy.

Google’s entire business model is predicated on serving the right ad at the right time to the right person. They historically have done this in two primary ways, Adwords and Adsense. The Adwords program serves ads, typically text, along your search engine results while Adsense serves ads on content pages of participating web sites. In super simple terms, Google gets paid when an ad is clicked on. Adwords always gets higher click-through rates than Adsense, and therefore generates more revenue for Google, for one simple reason – relevancy.

I managed pay-per-click (PPC) search marketing (Adwords and Adsense) for Harley-Davidson and I am a big fan, especially of Adwords. It is an incredible program, a modern day Yellow Pages. If you were a plumber in Milwaukee what better place to put your ad dollars than in the Yellow Pages where you know people who need a plumber will go. They are actively seeking out the product/service you provide. Search marketing works the same way and its full potential has still not been reached. This tactic contrasts with the plumber running TV spots, where you count on interrupting potential customers’ programming, hope they stick around to pay attention, hope they need your services, hope they remember you and then hope they call. That’s a lot of hope.

There is a huge difference between needing a plumber and therefore trying to find one in the search engine (Adwords) versus reading about, say, replacing storm windows on a DIY site and having an Adsense plumber ad show up. Even if you might need a plumber, it’s not as relevant. You’re not in active “plumber-seeking” mode. Your mind is on storm window work.

To serve more ads while capturing more data Google gives all their innovative products away – Gmail, Picasa, Google Docs, search and so on. Even the rumored Google phone would supposedly be “free” with ads served up. And this is a brilliant business model.

But with Google’s foray into radio ads, print ads, TV (subscription required) and online video and display ads, they’re getting even further away from the realm of the Adwords search ad model for the less effective, less impactful, less relevant world of interruption advertising. Now, Google captures so much data on us that they are going to get better and better at delivering the right interruption-media ad to you but, even with the best algorithms in the world, that ad you see is still interruption-based and therefore less relevant, so the success won’t ever be near the level of search. And since Google advertising is about pay-by-accountability/measurement of audience impact, that means measurements like click-through rates will be lower, which means revenue will be lower. And that doesn’t take into account the privacy backlash that could result from the ever-growing accumulation of personal data on users.

Am I worried about Google faltering any time soon? Uh, no.

Would I short their stock anytime soon? Nope.

Am I saying they should not get into the world of interruption media? Of course not, there’s lots of money there.

But would I count on their big move into interruption media ensuring revenue growth at the same pace that search advertising created for them? Not at all.

Would I tell advertisers not to use Google new offerings? No, in fact it’s more accountable than a lot of the junk out there.

But will it be as effective? Not a chance.

I’m not a computer scientist, don’t know algorithms and can’t guess at what super-brilliant ideas Google’s working on next. But I do know advertising and know that interruption media is less effective. If search dollars slow in a few years I don’t expect an interruption media strategy to pick up the slack completely.

What do you think, am I way off?

User Interface as Brand Touchpoint

Last week was the end of regular classes. I'm in the middle of Intersession where I'm jamming away on final projects and exams for "A" session before we kick off "B" session next week. Just finished a project for my Portfolio Planning class and was skimming through last week's notes from Cognitive Human Factors where our professor Ken mentioned something pretty interesting that I wrote down. I hadn't really spent much time thinking of this before.

He suggested that User Interface design will start paying more attention to "brand." Now that's interesting and makes total sense. If you or your clients make a list of all your customer touchpoints, which most of us have done often enough, you'll list retail stores, TV spots, brochures, customer service line, web site, etc. That last one, web site, I often left at that. And maybe rightfully so since I dealt in consumer goods on the client and agency sides. But a tech company's UI is a major part of its brand. Think Apple (GUI interface) or Google (search results) or Amazon (product reviews, recommendations).

Are companies maximizing this opportunity? Curious if this is viewed from a branding/marketing standpoint or if that's solely the domain of the engineers and usability test experts.

In a different class I mentioned how my mindmap follows Amazon- and Google-like organizational processes online (it's what I've grown accustomed to and now expect) and how companies offering products online (e.g. travel sites) or offline (e.g. GPS) can use that to their benefit. If nearly everyone and their mother uses those two sites, can you tailor your offerings to use those heuristics to ingratiate yourself, appear familiar and, ultimately, sell more to customers? I don't mean literally ripping off their IP but rather using the cues we've all formed habits around.

Playing with Post-its

We’re rockin’ now! As I’ve mentioned, our team in my Design Planning Workshop is working on a project on Gen Y and shopping for a major retailer. It’s getting really busy as we cruise through secondary research while digging into the lives of Gen Y through various methods, interviewing twenty-somethings as well as “extremes” like professional shoppers. A couple of weeks ago we distributed disposable cameras and journals to eleven Gen Yers and had them capture in pictures and words there shopping habits for a week.

Once the cameras and journals were collected, our team of eight divided into small groups and interviewed the research participants in their homes, asking them to walk through their photos and journal entries, discuss habits and opinions, give us a tour of their living space and so on. Today we met as an entire group and each team presented the people they interviewed to the rest of the team. We have written up personas for each person and shared those with the team, posting the pictures the participants took, as well as pictures we took during the interview, on large foam core boards.

Each interview team described the participant, and tried to bring them alive for the others. As a team talked the rest of us would write down notable habits, insights, quotes and anecdotes on Post-it notes and then would place them on the participant's board, clustering similar themes and ideas together. You can see us “in action” here.

Once this is complete we’ll start analyzing, determining dozens and dozens of insights that will then go into the Insight Matrix, an Excel Macro tool developed by our professor, Vijay Kumar, that helps visually organize similar insights into clusters that might be worth exploring further. This is one of the many tools and frameworks we’re being taught at ID that we’re using in Workshop for a real client. So cool!

The whole team is really jazzed about the project and the process. I’m learning a ton about how to uncover insights through in-depth interviews and observation, and then process these to find meaningful patterns that can help drive innovative ideas.

As a marketer, I’m accustomed to doing quantitative research that ensures we have some statistical validity as well. With these design processes though, the goal is to uncover unarticulated needs and find new ideas, and that can only be done by really getting into the user’s life and better understanding them. There’s no need, and no real use, in fielding quantitative studies at this stage. You want extreme users, extreme habits, extreme work-arounds, extreme anything because that’s where opportunity lies.

It reminds me of a quote by Ryan Matthews and Watts Wacker, who stated in Fast Company, “Deviance tells the story of every mass market ever created. What starts out weird and dangerous becomes America’s next big corporate payday. So are you looking for the next mass market idea? It’s out there … way out there.”

So that’s our Saturday. I’ll keep you posted as we move along to the next stages on this project.

Wanna buy a nice suit coat? Size 46 chest, 42 waist, shoulder 20, sleeve 25, blue, double-breasted.

In an earlier post, I mentioned Delta’s Song and that two major items jumped out – their credo and their target audience. I think the target audience item really highlights the problem with many companies’ approach to new ideas - self-centered, inward focus - which can be rectified with a design-centered approach.

The case study states that after four months of work by McKinsey consultants and an LCC Task Force of super smart Delta executives, they turned over a game plan for a new low-cost airline, outlining routes, aircraft to be used, pricing, etc. The article states, “On other matters, however, the proposal was purposely left open.” It continues, “…the construction of the airline began with a search for a target customer.”

What?! Four months of work, brilliant people and expensive consulting fees and they created a plan with no audience. If I was given a business plan and told to implement it and there were all kinds of fancy charts, analyses, instructions on where my planes had to fly, what I can charge, etc., but then was told “the rest” is up to me, well I would like to think I would tell them where they could put that PowerPoint.

As our professor pointed out, the task force did the easy part. Not that it's easy work to complete but easy as in the data, the information, is laying out there, “known” – detailed analyses of cost, ideal turnaround times, route planning, etc.

The hard part is finding unmet, usually unarticulated, needs that solve real problems and then creating an appropriate solution. The hard part specific to Song's management was finding people for which this offering was relevant. Delta did it backwards. They went and found a solution (a theoretical one at that) for a non-existent problem and then gave the Song team the job of finding people who fit that solution. It’s like a tailor making a bunch of incredibly customized suits ahead of time and then trying to hunt down customers with the right measurements who happen to like that color, that style with that number of buttons.

The problem Delta acted as if it was trying to address was already solved…by Jet Blue and Southwest. The problem Delta was really solving for wasn’t a customer problem, it was a Delta problem – how to stop losing money in Florida to competitors. At the risk of sounding super obvious, customers don’t make purchase decisions based on how they can help you.

Who gets to be a part of design?

There’s some really great debate going on at Bruce Nussbaum’s blog. I’m a bit baffled though about the part of the debate about who is qualified to practice design and what is or isn’t a "real" designer. I know this much, we can spend our time arguing about who has earned the right to be a designer, what a card-carrying design thinker is, and where this or that type of person belongs, but the fact is, whether you come from a business background, a traditional design background, some combination, or as David Armano points out, learn through real-world practice, none of that matters ultimately. It’s the end result. No one remembers the first person who talked about sailing west to get to Asia. We only remember the one who did it.

I spent nearly seven years in the advertising world hearing some in the creative department convey a message to the rest of the agency and to clients that they were the only ones that could/should have good, creative ideas. While they were busy saying that, the media department was creating a media plan for the first one-second commercial, PR people were running a premier energy efficiency forum in D.C., brand planners were uncovering insights on joint pain and account execs were pushing interactive content ideas. It reminds me of a great cartoon showing two vultures sitting on a tree limb and one says to the other, “Patience my ass. Let’s go kill something.”

Personally, I’m interested in creating remarkable products, services, experiences – creating something of value for people at a profit for the organization. I believe design thinking is the way. I have the utmost respect for and readily acknowledge and admire those that are light-years ahead of where the rest of the world is. They got it before the rest of us, hell most of the “the rest of us” still haven’t gotten it. But that doesn’t mean that the rest of us, sketchpad designer or not, should sit back and wait for permission to act.

I believe there’s room for everyone and those that want to determine who gets to “use” design are missing the point. This should be viewed as a great opportunity to launch design into the stratosphere. A rising tide raises all ships. To not welcome those that have an interest in design is to push back a tide that can help your cause.

Mark Twain said, “Keep away from those who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you believe that you too can become great.” I’ve found nothing but support and encouragement from colleagues, friends and even strangers sending e-mails, for wanting to learn more about design. It’s not an “us and them” but a “we.” A new product, service, experience, business model – that to me is an innovation and that’s what I chose to go back to school to improve my skills on, and specifically to go to ID, where they meld the business and design worlds and teach rigorous, repeatable innovation methods based on design thinking. Compared to say, graphic design, it’s the same mindset, some similar processes, some different tools, different outputs.

I’m not super interested in labels/categories. Call me marketer, brand manager, strategist, designer, design thinker, design strategist, business thinker or guy that tries to get remarkable things done (This last one would be the biggest compliment. If I ever start my own business that would make a nice title on a business card).

I’m here to learn more, to grow my knowledge, my skills, my ability to uncover relevancy and meaning and translate that into action and value. Richard Branson and Yvon Chouinard didn’t spend time on the semantics of the definition of businessperson and didn't ask for a Harvard MBA to tell them if they "fit." They took what they knew and created their own definition by action. Steve Jobs took a calligraphy class after dropping out of college. He might’ve been looked at as the weird dropout in the back of the class with no pedigree but he didn’t wait for someone to tell him if he could be a designer.

I don’t have the answers to who should get to participate in design thinking but I think anyone with passion, interest, a desire to learn and ultimately the ability to deliver results can. I do agree with Mark, who said in a comment to Bruce’s post, “no one owns these.”

All I know is, there’s too much opportunity and not enough time in the day as it is to spend it arguing over rights. Let’s go kill something.

McDonald's for lunch

Don't worry, there's enough material out in the world that I'm not resorting to listing my meals. It was actually because of my Prototyping Methods class. This is the last week of our "A" session so our class got to take a field trip. I love field trips!

My all-time favorite was a trip in 3rd or 4th grade to some predecessor of today's IMAX theaters out around State Fair Park in Dallas. Today's class trip probably topped that, although my elementary school crush, Patrice Surley, wasn't there this time.

Anyway, we visited McDonald's innovation center, including a tour by the operations manager and a Q&A at the end with Denis Weil, vice president of innovation and concept development. Denis is an ID alum and will be co-teaching a Service Design class I'm taking in "B" session.

It was an incredible opportunity and generated some great discussion around prototyping and design processes. I won't say more about the innards, lest my grade suffers next quarter, but it's a cool example of the kind of real-world experiences we get exposed to here.

And then to top it off, we got free lunch - I landed chicken selects, fries and a Diet Coke. It's getting around dinner time as I write this and I'm kinda wishing ID had an alum working innovation at Ruth's Chris right now.