Christopher Lochhead: observation

Transcript context

…I really like this idea of languaging. Are there any other examples come to mind, awesome examples of languaging in action that worked out? I got a bazillion of them. Another one of my favorites. When Starbucks first starts a coffee is 10 cents. You sit there and you go, "We can't make money at 10 cents." That doesn't make sense, right? Unit economics don't work for what we're trying to get done. If the ASP in the industry is 10 cents, we want to have an ASP of three bucks. Fuck. Well, here's the aha. It's very hard to charge three bucks for a thing that everybody currently pays a quarter for, if you call it the same thing. So they create new languaging, they teach, they literally teach consumers new language. That's why you and I walk into Starbucks and say, "I'd like a double grande latte, please." 25 years ago, that was not languaging that you and I used. And they use it as a mechanism for radical differentiation and radical value/price differentiation. And they made up the fucking word. It sounds kind of Italian, vente. But the truth is, by the way, it's a milkshake, but that's a whole other conversation. They're the number one milk seller in the country. They're a milk company, not a coffee company. But that's, again, a whole other conversation. The point being, if you want to charge three bucks for something that heretofore has been 10 cents or a quarter, change the language. And you know it's Starbucks language. Where I live, there's a shit ton of new hipster independent coffee shop type places. Where they paint the Mona Lisa in your latte before- ... where they paint the Mona Lisa in your latte before they give it to you and all that shit. If you walk into one of those hipster places and ask for a double grande latte, the super hipster gal or guy behind the counter with the nose ring and shit is going to give you a bit of a grizzle, because you are using Starbucks languaging in their location, and that's the other breakthrough. This is really important in the technology industry, the company that creates the languaging for the category wins. Oh, you see that today, OpenAI. Not that long ago you did not hear the term large language model. Correct? Correct.…

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