Inspiration: Where Does It Come From?
This is a question that we’ve been asking on the Good Folks, Doing Good Work interview series and it got us thinking about it in the macro across the whole specialty coffee industry as it relates to branding. Often we describe inspiration as a well that we drink from. So here’s the question…what well are you drinking from?
So much of what we see in specialty coffee is a regurgitation of the loudest voices in coffee whether its through messaging, branding, websites, packaging, etc. Much of this is a result of the industry as a whole drinking from the same well. If we’re all drinking from the same well, our well is going to have its own culture. It’s own distinct taste. It’s own distinct smell even. This uniqueness is beautiful but sometimes there’s a need to take a drink from another well. To learn from those doing things that have nothing to do with what you are doing.
As it relates to branding and marketing, we see the same sort of tactics, tools and visuals being overused to the point that different coffee companies, whether they are on the green or roasted side of the industry, are almost indistinguishable from one another.
Opportunity Is In The Margin
We’ve been asking the question, where is opportunity found? We’ve come to believe that opportunity is in between the lines. It’s in the margins and it’s in the areas that are overlooked. Here, in between the lines, is where the deepest insights and the biggest opportunities can be found. The sort of opportunities that others aren’t seizing because it's not the most intuitive place to look.
You’ve likely heard the story of the mathematician Abrahm Wald and if you haven’t, it’s worth a 20-30 minute trip down the Google rabbit hole, but here’s the gist. Abraham Wald was asked to determine where to add armor to bombers during WWII to decrease the number of bombers that were shot down during missions. Wald wasn’t an experienced pilot, nor did he have combat experience, but he was just the person for this task. So he had a look at the airplanes that made it through battle to return home and created a data visualization of what he found. The red dots represent bullet holes in planes that returned from missions:
Image Source: https://alearningaday.blog/2018/06/20/abraham-wald/
The intuitive thought is to place armor where the planes were hit. This very normal and intuitive response is called Survivorship Bias. Instead of placing armor where the planes were hit, Wald determined armor needed to be added where there were no bullet holes because this is where planes that weren’t returning to base were likely being hit.
The intuitive response is to turn our attention to where the data is drawing our eyes but the real opportunity is in the margins. The real need is to ask ourselves, “Are we asking the right question?” Are we drinking from the right well or are we being negatively influenced by the drinking from the same well everyone else is drinking from?
This is what we mean by looking to the margins for opportunity. Those bank spaces with no bullet holes are where opportunity lives. Doing what everyone else is doing, going where everyone else is going, and only pulling from your own industry and understanding doesn’t lead you to a place of strategic growth as a brand or business.
You’ve most certainly have heard the quote typically attributed to Picasso, “Good artists borrow, great artists steal.” But this quote assumes that who/what/where you are borrowing or stealing from is actually valuable to begin with. But what if the things that you are borrowing/stealing/being inspired by are no longer valuable because their value has already been soaked up by the masses?
Since we work primarily with folks in specialty coffee, we will be speaking directly to y’all but stick around if you aren’t in coffee…there’s some nuggets here for you too. You’ll just have to look in the margins for the nuggets.
Where you should be looking for inspiration.
There’s no wrong answers here, but have a look outside of coffee and outside of tangential food and beverage companies, folks, and educational material…i.e. don’t phone it in by just having a look at other food and bev companies, articles, and folks. You should be a little uncomfortable by how little you know about the well you are drinking from.
Inspirational Starting Places
Big Tech
One industry that would be beneficial to learning from and being inspired by, is Big Tech. Specialty coffee is at a minimum, 5-10 years behind most industries as it relates to technology and could use a technological facelift. The speed, the thinking, and the vision that folks in big tech have is something our industry could do well to learn from.
Practically, how might you utilize tech to improve your business?
Business Thought Leaders
Another area that would be beneficial to spend time learning about and gleaning inspiration from are business thought leaders outside of coffee. Often, we write them off as heartless, out of touch, and “part of the problem” but there are things we can learn from them. Be the Robin Hood of business…take their ideas and use them for the betterment of the people who don’t have the same access that you have to these business leaders.
Practically, how might you learn from the business leaders of today to improve the lives of the people that your roaster or green coffee company comes into contact with?
Project Managers & UX Folks
These folks understand the value of iteration and the need to listen to their users/buyers to make continual improvement. Certainly showing some of our colors here because we’ve learned so much from Scrum. If you aren’t familiar with Scrum as a concept, it’s essentially a way of working as a team or rather a theory of work. The theory goes something like this - remove hierarchy, increase communication, learn from the actual users / buyers, focus your effort on the most important tasks, and iterate indefinitely to make the user/buyer’s experience as amazing as it can be.
This is where coffee companies stand to gain the most because this repetitive question is continually asked, “How might we make this better?” This question pushes a roaster, green coffee company, or other business owner to remove, “Good enough” from their vocabulary and replace it with, “This is what we have today and tomorrow we will make it better.”
Practically, how might this way of thinking improve your business or buyer's experience?
Everyone of us has seen something that Onyx Coffee Lab has done at some point and thought to themselves, I want to do something like that. Or perhaps, you’ve even started a project trying to rip them off. Hats off to them, to be sure, but as it relates to your brand, you aren’t Onyx and that’s ok. Your brand is uniquely your brand and being inspired is different than ripping something off.
We’ll leave you with a few questions get your gears turning and help you start looking to the margins for inspiration.
For coffee folks, try answering these questions:
What would your next coffee release look like if you’d never seen a release before?
If you didn't sell coffee, how would you structure your releases?
What would be an effective way of communicating the challenges our industry is facing to someone who’s never heard of coffee before?
If you’d never tasted coffee, what would compel you to give it a taste?
If you weren’t allowed to follow any coffee people/businesses/leaders, who would you learn from?
If you aren’t in coffee but are feeling that you’re in an echo chamber, try asking these questions:
If we had zero buyers, what would we do to communicate the value of our product?
If all the information about who we are, what we sell, and how we help was deleted and erased from everyone’s memory, how would we endeavor to rebuild? What things would we leave out and what new things would we add into our process?
If every major voice in our industry went silent and every piece of industry specific educational material was erased tonight, what industry/leader/people would you learn from?
Have a question or just want to reach out? Send us an email at hi@thelevco.com.