We were tired and little shell shocked. It had been a trying day – leaving us very late for dinner in a sleepy resort town on a Sunday night. We finally found a place that was still open and sauntered in.
The musician in the corner was playing a song we both appreciated and that calmed us down. The waiter came to tell us the specials.
The first two were pretty standard. The third however was something like aged rib-eye with a balsamic red wine jalapeño chocolate agate thyme basil lavender tart cherry duck blood marzipan shallot béarnaise aioli hollandaise coffee butterscotch malt reduction.
We stared. By the time he was done with the mile long and seemingly impossible ingredient list we looked back at the menu for something. It was incredible the number of things they thought they could cram into the dish. I’m not sure if it really existed, or if the chef just really hated that guy and wanted to give him something hard to remember.
In business we see this type of thing with impossible to decipher Microsoft licensing agreements, mortgage documents, and software packages with 20 million alleged features. There is a point where people just stop tuning in. Like us, they will buy what they can comprehend – or buy what they feel forced to.
Either way, the producer’s message isn’t getting across. It’s not being poorly communicated by marketing. It’s messaging may not be bad. It’s buried under the confusing weight of its own feature set.
Comments