photo credit: craftster.org

Saturday Night finds me sitting at a  bar where a friend of mine works.  I had decided that regaling him with my story about seeing Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Science of Sleep) interviewed at SXSW could not in fact wait until some time when he wasn’t working.  You can see his Q&A about movies here.  Unfortunately, there were a whole bunch of people at the bar that were really drunk already taking up all of his time (they had been there since 3PM or some ungodly time like that) so I was killing time and half listening to a conversation next to me.

“I’d hate to have to work on roller skates”  A blonde girls announces to me.

“why would you say that?”  I ask and she nods to the TV where the Sonic commercial with all of the roller skate equipped waitresses are floating along with trays piled high with drinks.

“I would just hate that.  It looks like they are so fake happy”  and she goes back to her other conversation but I keep thinking about roller skates.  Clearly, Sonic is trying to stand out.  Just like I tell everyone who wants to start a blog, Twitter feed, anything online.  Standing out is important.  Just think about all of the blogs you read and the companies you like and you’ll see that they all have a twist to their marketing, branding, business model that makes them different.  However, I would argue that the different twist has to be integral to the business to make it matter.

In other words, roller skating waitresses comes off gimmicky even to a drunk person who is not in marketing.

If you look at people who are branding themselves well online you can certainly use something like humor, attire, and sarcasm to be different.  It’s a person.  If you are a business you can use those too but they have to relate to the way you do business.  For example, one funny YouTube video from a tax firm isn’t something that’s going to make them stand out as a business.  It’s something they decided upon and it’s a marketing tool.  If the tax accountants there are for some reason extremely funny then that angle would be more appropriate.

However, if I were somehow forced to roller skate for my job I would do it in these.  ($75)