Had to take the picture through our dirty windows so it is pretty poor quality. Scaffolding obscures the right part of the photo. Our building is constantly under work (over 100 years old with history as a cookie factory and bookbinder… now converted residential lofts).

Street teams were on many corners of downtown Chicago today–handing out FREE 8oz bottles (glass) of Coke Blak. How much will this tactic do for the product? I liked the taste–I’d rather have less sugar in it. If it did, I might start to drink this on some afternoons rather than coffee (though I’ll still have my morning joe). So, if the product is appealing, will free samples be a better method to generate adoption than mass advertising or couponing?

Let’s say the cost, including labor and product, of the street team event came out to $2.00 per sample and they handed out 10,000 bottles during a two hour period during the lunch hour in Chicago. Of course, you have the 10,000 people that tried the product. Let’s say 2,000 of them liked it enough to buy. So you invested $20,000 for 2,000 adopters. A decent investment on it’s own. Then you get the network effect of me telling others. I brought the bottle back to my office–and it started a conversation on the elevator among 6 people. So it generated buzz, on the first order of 1 to 6. So in the case of positive interactions, the buzz effect was 12,000 people. There were also indirect effects. My coworkers and I saw at least 10 people walking around with the bottles in the preceding minute before we saw them being handed out. Coke Blak was everywhere during the lunch timeframe. Say that’s another 20 impressions for each bottle handed out–that’s 200,000 impressions in addition to actual product sampling.

A wise investment? Who knows? How many people are blogging about it? 1,912 “coke blak” posts on Technorati. My take? I think it’s a good move on Coke’s part. And as LP says, this should spur Pepsi on to bring Kona back.

I was on my way out the door this morning waiting for an elevator down when I cautiously eyed a doberman-esque dog exit the up elevator.

An unrelated aside:

I was mildly “attacked” walking to work the other day. A leashed dog came at me and started jumping up and trying to bite. I’ve thought out my responses to something like that–and I executed the plan–at least the first step. I had a pretty rugged jacket on so I pulled my hand into the sleeve, turned a sideways profile to the dog, and used my arm as a “chomp” sponge. If the dog would have actually sunk teeth in, I would execute step two. Dog lovers: beware. I am a dog lover, but I’m not going to stand by while a dog mauls me. So if the dog would have actually locked on to me I would have swung around my legs and scissored the dog’s neck and put the vice down. Doing this move means there’s no turning back. If you let the dog go–it’s in fight/flight mode–and since he was a bigger dog–I wouldn’t have risked letting him go. Thankfully, the under-powered woman that had him leashed was able to pull him in. Here’s the thing though–she didn’t say anything to me. She’s telling her dog no–as I walk away thinking her dog’s lucky, not me.

Okay–that wasn’t the point of this post. I was busy avoiding the dog coming out of the elevator this morning and almost didn’t recognize the woman with the dog. She’s a former co-worker and friend–who I hadn’t seen for a year. We both looked at each other puzzled.

“You live here? Where?”

We live less than 100 feet from each other on the same floor–for 6 months now–and didn’t know it. Weird.

Today I was talking about city vs suburb with a suburbanite (we still live in the city) and hearing many of the same points about why the burbs can be better. The odd thing is, I really think that people are right about the potential social nature of neighborhoods in the burbs versus the city. In the city you are around too many people to be sociable. As paradoxical as that seems, I think it’s true.

I really love the city and don’t want to miss out on it. And I hate manufactured neighborhoods and the sprawl of the burbs. But there are diamonds in the edges of Chicago. Quite a few of our friends are having kids and moving out of the city–and the best place they are going, in my mind, is the one of older burbs like Oak Park–where the community is old enough to have built it’s own personality, social system, soul. It’s strange. I think there is a magic proximity or housing density that facilitates community. I’m not sure my factory converted to lofts condo building is it… Or maybe it just doesn’t attract the right people. Not sure. I’ll keep ruminating on this as Gina and I start to think about houses rather than the loft…

So I hit up the family than owns/runs the subway in my building (see this post) and the movie being filmed was Jennifer Aniston and Vince Vaughn’s — The Break Up. I have no idea why they chose to film where the did… but I’m mildly interested. Probably have to netflix it (I know–it’s still in post-production) to see.