I just joined School of the Possible. I haven’t had good conversation with a group of creative minds in a long time, and I’m going to see if I can get some of that back. As I was filling out my profile information, there was a bio field to fill in.
I am not good at bio fields. And I rarely take them seriously. Some of my favorites are “I’m 1992’s Uncle Rico. Get off my lawn.” and “I used to podcast but I ran out of things to say.” I felt like I needed to try a little harder on this one.
I’ve used “I am an amplifier” before. Not the guitar-pedal kind. The PA kind. Paul Corrigan, a creative director of mine at Barkley, called me this once because he thought I was great at taking a lot of smaller, random ideas and mixing them into one big one.
We were working on ways we could digitally integrate Sonic Drive-In’s loyalty program. This was 2008, so scanning a loyalty card was the height of that experience, and we were trying to make the loyalty experience frictionless somehow. And I thought, “what if your car was your loyalty card?”
Theresa pulls into a Sonic Drive-In stall, the system detects the car, gives the carhop notice of any rewards she earned, and automatically counts today’s order toward her loyalty balance. It would allow them to automatically pay. We could pull it off with something like turnpike tags, but there’s no way it would have been cost effective in 2008.
As I thought about this old story this morning, I realized that this was essentially what Amazon Go does, just a decade early. Mobile ordering kills this particular Sonic idea. I started to argue that the car still knows something the app doesn’t, that you’ve actually pulled in. Then I realized the phone knows that too, down to the stall, and it doesn’t care what you’re driving. It’s the better sensor, and we couldn’t have known that in 2008.