Labnotes » Authenticity is the side-effect of being small

I can’t believe he said that:

Are we ever authentic? Is fresh goat cheese made in tiny batches (bought on a farm in France) any different from huge vats of goat cheese produced by Kraft somewhere in Wisconsin and delivered weekly to your local supermarket? What if you couldn’t tell them apart in a taste test?

I love Seth’s blog, it’s brilliant. But this time, he took his thesis a bit too far and damn the reality.

For the record this all starts with toothpastes, Colgates buying Tom’s. I don’t think it will make Tom’s any less authentic, unfortunately I don’t think it will make Tom’s any better. Aquafresh is my preferred choice, they make the best tasting toothpaste ever. In a blind taste, the one that tastes less like mint-covered sandpaper wins.

But back to Seth’s thesis.

To answer the question: yes.

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My favorite coffee shop, the owner has hand selected the best coffee beans in the world, bought the best coffee machines in the world. They also eat their own dog food so to speak. They taste drinks made by their barrista (each and every one, as often as they can), they sit down and receive service like every other customer.

You can’t scale that.

No matter how much you try, the key ingredient doesn’t scale. It’s called taste and preferences.

Starbucks can buy the best coffee in the world, can purchase the best machines in the world, but can the owner taste ever barrista’s drinks? Can they sit at every store and experience the service? Will they remember every employee by name? Can they pay enough attention to the details to keep quality?

When your business is about taste and human touch, it starts out as either great, bad or bland. It’s all up to the owner’s taste and preferences. When you franchise, you add more owners, you split the workload across people of varying tastes and preferences. And all of a sudden it’s no longer great, bad or bland. It’s just average.

Because part of scaling is making sure that the store in Cleveland is no less better than the store in Pittsburg. When you can’t let one store be worse, you can’t let other stores be better, and all of a sudden everyone plays on the average scale.

Do they lose authenticity? Maybe. But that’s irrelevant. Authenticity doesn’t make great products, authenticity is a side effect of great experiences.

Your local sandwich shop may be better than or worse than Subway, because there will always be opportunities to be better or worse than average. Would you hype the local authentic bad sandwich shop? Or would you only hear about the local authentic great sandwich shop? You see, authenticate is not better, but better is authentic.

What we hype is something different, something better, something personal you can’t quantify but can only feel. And what you can’t quantify can’t be franchised of merchandised, because there’s no system in the world that can mass produce the untangible. What we call authentic is that untangile thing we can’t quite describe that makes all the difference, the little difference in taste or aroma that only a few people know how to make right.

Incidentally, that thing we call authentic doesn’t scale.

Update: More here and here.