Espresso: Seth Godin How Shake Shack Keep The Magic as They Scale

0:06one thing i think you may not know him actually as a guy called david hyatt who's got hyatt denim You may have heard of him. He's been on this podcast, and I just love what he's doing, creating genes for creatives. He taught me something that I ask a lot of guests. He said very simply, scale kills magic. And the bigger you get, the more often you can kind of dilute the magic, the brand. One thing Danny Mayer has done with Shake Shack is he seems to have kept the magic as he's scaled. Could you speak to that? How do people keep the magic as they scale, in your opinion? Yeah. First, a small riff on the Hyatt.

0:52I had one on Hyatt Jeans. I had one of the first pair. The thing to understand about jeans, which also connects to food, is this. No one buys a pair of his jeans who's naked. You're only buying his jeans if you already have a pair of pants and no one goes to a restaurant when it's the only meal they're ever going to have. They could skip this meal. They could go to a different restaurant. We have to begin by saying we are not solving a we are the only choice for this person and this person doesn't have what we sell. That's not what we do when we're in the food business. That's an aside. but scale kills magic.

1:33Scale kills magic until the scale becomes part of the magic. In the case of Apple, having the same phone as everybody else actually makes your phone more magic for some people. In the case of Shake Shack, knowing that this isn't the only Shake Shack in the world makes Shake Shack more magic for some people. The original Shake Shack had a different magic. The original Shake Shack, which I went to a bunch of times, had a huge line, 200 people, and it was the only one. That's why people were in line. But now, knowing that when your flight lands in Abu Dhabi, there's a Shake Shack gives you a smile because the scale is part of the magic.

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3:21Is that by constraining it to one? Is it one state? I don't actually know, but what's the magic in that? I haven't researched it lately. There's a few bits of magic at In-N-Out. First of all, I am certain that you can find a better hamburger without flying to California. If better means blind taste test, for sure. They're not saying in a blind taste test, this is the best burger. They're saying this is the burger that reminds you of the last time you were in and out. This is the burger that reminds you of the California life you're living. This is the burger that reminds you of the friends you've had these burgers with.

3:55And they also have a secret menu. And the secret menu awards status by offering affiliation. If you know the secret menu, you can order from the secret menu, and that makes you feel like an insider, right? So all of these things cycle around. I think In-N-Out has made a business decision about scale that, for example, Krispy Kreme did not. Krispy Kreme had a brand similar to In-N-Out in that there were people who admired its scarcity. And then they decided to grow up big as fast as they could, and they crashed because they couldn't figure out how to make the scale part of magic. So in the case of In-N-Out, they're making plenty of money.

4:37They don't want to hire 15 more vice presidents raise all this money and blah blah blah why bother they're doing fine and so scale isn't the point magic is the point you want to find the right scale to provide the magic that's important to you thank you so so much for listening it honestly means the world to me i hope you enjoyed your morning coffee and go and have an amazing day let's be having ya if you want the full episode it will be in the show notes and it will be in the show notes the full episode thank you so much please leave friends as well it means the world to me

5:14I can't remember.