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Brick No131: The Hot Or Not Rule
By Matt Weston, Thursday 10 February 2005 It Will Grow Back On Tuesday, before the Angel Reader Meet-Up, I took a hike East along the Regent's Canal path. Maybe a mile along, the Canal intersects Hackney's Kingsland Road, AKA the A10. And about 100 yards away from that point, stands my all-time favourite shopfront. Or used to stand. It's gone. On Tuesday, I found number 296 boarded up, and the bulldozers about to roll in. I had trekked over to Kingsland Road to take a photo of my favourite shopfront, a photo I couldn't find anywhere on the WWW. A photo I wanted to share with you, Dear Reader. But as I can't show you a picture, I'll just have to give you a thousand words. Or less . . . It Will Grow Back. (That was the name of the place, not an observation that you can't keep a good shopfront down.) It . . . was a hairdressers specialising in avant-garde African hair designs. The shop window was chocka with real "After" photos -- from memory maybe 150 cornrowed, weaved, braided, and knotted designs -- hundreds of hours of immensely detailed work. Not for them the "canned" photos of pro hair models that adorn your typical chopshop. And It Will Grow Back, as a name writ large and bright, screamed out for a gut reaction. I used to pass it on my journey to work (the 243 route). It was always busy. And, on more than a handful of occasions, I caught people pointing, laughing, and talking about IWGB. You couldn't just walk past the place and think, Oh, a hairdressers. The name, It Will Grow Back, forced you to take an immediate position. Am I a risk-taker or not? It didn't just get your attention, it forced you to make a gut reaction: Is It Will Grow Back for me, or not? Malcolm Gladwell's latest, "Blink" is packed with social experiments and triangular tests that I think explain why this works. But I'm sure you'll forgive me if I take you on a slightly more lite detour instead . . . The Hot Or Not Rule "See, I reckon you're about an 8 or a 9. Maybe even 9 and a half in four beers time. That blue Top Shop top you've got on is nice. Bit too much fake tan though. But yeah, you score high." The Streets, "Fit But You Know It". We are drawn to extremes. James Hong and Jim Young came up with the idea for Hot Or Not over a mid-afternoon Heineken. In 4 years over 4 million people, mainly 18-24 year olds, have posted their pictures online to be rated 1-10 by Hot Or Not visitors. They take over 10 million votes a day. Incidentally, JH and JY have managed to turn a gimmicky game into a dating service that earns several million dollars a year. Later on, take a read of this New York Times write-up. But, for now, here's my Hot Or Not Rule: It's much easier to give somebody a really high score (9 or 10) or a really low score (2 or 3, nobody gives 1's according to the makers), than it is to give somebody a middling score (4, 5, 6, 7 or 8). If, in your eyes, somebody lies at either extreme of the Hot Or Not spectrum, you make a gut, split-second reaction. If you have to decide between a 5, 6 or a 7, you dither, you compare, you think. It takes far longer to dole out a score of 6 than it does to give a 10 or a 2. My point isn't that it pays to be a 10. It's that, if you want people to react to your product, shop, service, or business, you need to play at the extremes. There's another barbershop called A Cut Above round the corner. But that name asks you to compare. A Cut Above what? People walk on by. They don't make a gut reaction either way. It Will Grow Back played at the extremes. You couldn't help but make a gut reaction. Nobody walked past It Will Grow Back without making an immediate decision as to whether, for them, it was Hot Or Not. Footnote: It Will Grow Back, After All Btw, I managed to track down Gifty Collins, the multi- talented owner of It Will Grow Back. It turns out the shop was doing just great. But then the landlord put the whole building up for sale. So Gifty decided to look for new premises, which is what she's doing right now. I'll keep you posted. The lady herself. Bric-A-Brac (1) Today's Brick tallies pretty well with what I wrote in Brick No94. You know you're playing at the extremes if you can define, in 30 seconds or less, the opposite extreme. The Un. (2) Hopefully you got Friday's email, which explained why I've moved Business Bricks to once-a-week, every Thursday. Oh, and if you signed up on Friday, there's a 1/34 chance you were our 10,000th subscriber. Congratulations! Remember to sign up: back to top |
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