Every hotel guest gets a key, and most patrons of hamburger restaurants order fries. Yet Graduate Hotels and Five Guys made a choice. They chose to take a piece of their operational chain that most competitors consider mundane and unimportant and turn it into a talk trigger by making it distinctly, talkably different. As Seth Godin wrote in Purple Cow, “Ask, ‘why not?’ Almost everything you don’t do has no good reason for it.” There is no good reason hotels don’t create conversations through keycards and restaurants don’t through bonus fries. It’s just not typically done. The brands profiled
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