Today is a landmark date for The Brand Chef, a true anniversary to be recognized.  Can you guess what it is?

No, it’s not my marriage to the beautiful Mrs. BrandChef.  It’s not the anniversary of being hired at Love Scott. Nope.  Not even the anniversary of my first kiss.  Nope.

But it’s almost as exciting…

Today is the 15^th anniversary of my induction into the elite club of mobile device users. YES!  On this day in 1995, I was given a “Work cell phone” as “a perk” while working as creative director at a local advertising agency.

While I knew it was really so my boss could call me, guilt-free at 2 a.m., I didn’t care.  I HAD A FREAKIN’ CELL PHONE! I was on cloud nine.  I could drive down the “hustle-bustle” of I-235 while drinking my Jolt Cola and talk to clients, vendors, my wife, my mom and my boss… all on my bitchen-cool cell phone.

Momentous? Heck yeah!  It was my personal introduction to the most revolutionary change in communication since grunts and cave paintings.

Well, okay, maybe there were a few other more significant milestones, but this was MY revolution…

Think of it… (and this is just a snapshot!)

• 45,000 to 10,000 BC: Grunts and cave paintings
• 1450: Guttenberg uses block printing press to print a love poem
• 1841: The advertising agency is born (Then all hell breaks lose!)
• 1860: Pony Express carries mail between St. Joseph, Mo. and Sacramento
• 1865: Atlantic cable ties Europe and U.S. for instant communication
• 1877: Edison invents the phonograph
• 1887: Montgomery Ward mails out a 540-page catalog
• 1914: First transcontinental telephone call
• 1926: Permanent radio network, NBC, is formed
• 1939: New York Worlds Fair shows television to public
• 1940: Disney’s Fantasia introduces stereo sound to American public (Tom Brokaw is born)
• 1949: Magnetic core computer memory is invented
• 1959: The microchip is invented
• 1968: FCC approves non-Bell equipment attached to phone system (I was born)
• 1971: Wang 1200 is the first word processor (just fun to say)
• 1975: The microcomputer, in kit form, reaches the U.S. home market
• 1976: Apple introduces the Apple I to the Homebrew Computer Club
• 1981: The IBM PC (meh)
• 1984: The one-megabyte memory chip
• 1991: Baby Bells get government permission to offer information services
• 1994: Prodigy bulletin board fields 12,000 messages in one after L.A. quake
• 1995: Andrew B. Clark (The Brand Chef) gets his first Nokia 6100 cell phone -AND life changes forever!

Simplistic?  Dreamy?  Sure… but technology is evolving faster every day, and I’ve been trying to keep up since THAT day.

The vision of the future is in the palm of your hand – figuratively and literally.  If you take into consideration that my first cell phone (sporting capabilities like incoming & outgoing calls as well as all the dropped signals I could manage) was less than 15 years ago, and today I can create this entire post (excluding graphics) on a BlackBerry mobile device that hangs right beneath my love handles; think of what the next 15 years will hold!

What was the first technology experience that you consider to be “Life altering?” Was it a cell phone?  Was it an electric typewriter? Or was it the recent iPad?

What ever it was, I bet Twitter still crashes on it…

How does your technology future look?

Keep Cooking (with the latest and greatest)!
Andrew B. Clark
The Brand Chef

Having worked in the restaurant industry through most of my adolescence and into my early 20’s, I was well aware of the old adage that went something like:

If a single upset customer tells 10 friends about an unsatisfactory experience, it’s conceivable those 10 friends could perpetuate that report to another 10… and so-on, and so-on… eventually damaging the restaurant’s brand bad enough to put it out of business.

Or, as Máma Brandcheffio said:

“Piss off one customer and you’ve lost 100…”

So, at a very young age, I was forced to learn two very important aspects to marketing.

1. Word-of-mouth marketing is very powerful.
2. The customer is always right.

WHAT? The customer is ALWAYS right?

Máma Brandcheffio used to tell me:

“Even if the customer is wrong, THE CUSTOMER IS ALWAYS RIGHT.”

Even at 15, that concept incensed me.  Today it seems like a complete disregard to human civility (See last week’s post) and is entirely defeatist in nature.

Luckily, I came to my senses.

Chew on this:

Originally, one disgruntled customer could, with good effort, affect the opinions of 100 others with their own word-of-mouth marketing.  In 1983, that was a pretty big deal. With 100 potential customers talking about poor service or a fuzzy hamburger bun, over several days, maybe months, the reputation of the restaurant could be damaged enough to warrant inspections, improvements or to be ostracized out of business all together.

That was 1983 word-of-mouth. (Yawn)

Today, our “upset” customer can take a photo, text a gripe to their iPhone or Tweet it to thousands or tens of thousands before your gazpacho reaches room temperature! If “viral” enough, those thousands can make an instantaneous decision to re-tweet it to their lists reaching thousands more!

Word-of-mouth marketing has reached light speed!

Restaurants, from local and regional to major chains, are taking a “more than cautious” approach to social media marketing.  They want to make sure it’s not a “fad” before jumping in.

Have they lost their minds? Maybe in 1983 that’d be okay, but this is 2009!

Not only are social media tools like Twitter and Facebook the fastest growing user-based tools on the Web, they have moved the “Customer is always right” paradigm entirely into the customer’s control, forever altering the approach to marketing communication and public relations.

Restaurants may not want to get involved in a “marketing” sense, but can you imagine how fast they will have to scramble when the “Chris Brogan” of the restaurant industry sends a damaging Tweet or photos of one of their cooks, in uniform, picking their boxers out of their ass as they walk into the kitchen?

Mmmmm, appetizing…

To put it simply, social media WILL affect your restaurant. Ignoring it is not an option for today’s restaurants, no matter what size.

It’s better to use basic social media tools and participate in a brand management program.  Otherwise, you can watch your brand (and your future) carried away in the beak of that ubiquitous little blue Twitter icon.

Food for thought.

Andrew B. Clark
The Brand Chef