Heart and Mind

Call, Click, and Come on In

Ever notice that people still say they're going to "dial" a phone number, even though there hasn't been a dial on the damn thing in close to 20-years?

The origin of the phrase, though, comes from the fact that at one time you did actually dial a phone. So the concept just stuck.

Words and language are funny like that and, if you think about it, you can come up with a whole bunch of examples that are similar in nature.

Well, I came across something the other day that I thought was particularly interesting, because it showed the evolution of a phrase through not one, but two different concepts.

I saw a store. A real, old-fashioned store, a "brick and mortar" store, as they're commonly called to differentiate them from a virtual "store" on the Internet that is really just a computer server. This was a store that you could drive up to and walk in, just like stores were 100 years ago.

Well, this store was called "1-800-Flowers.com." How funny is that?

For starters, it's clearly named after the branding that was established for an online store. A dot com. Hell, "dot com" is part of the store's name, despite the fact that it clearly is not a dot com in this particular case where I'm reading a sign on a store front.

But as a bonus, the first part of the name is a phone number! An "800" phone number. Something that lived large pre-Internet, and particularly pre-cell phone and pre-broadband where phone calls cost money, and an 800 number offered the user- and wallet-friendly option of being free to call.

So the store's name is a combination of a phone number and an dot com, despite being neither. That's awesome.

It's interesting to see how the branding was carried over, but even more fascinating to see how things kind of came full circle or went "backwards," in a way. Consider... this is a company that started as an 800 number, when clearly people must have been thinking, "Hey, stores are old fashioned and have overhead and require you to drive to them...that's nonsense! Let's do away with stores and offer a florist over the phone!" And thus was born 1-800-Flowers. And then, as expected, it took the next leap with technology where it said, "Hey, phones are fine, but the web is where it's at. Let's make this accessible through the Internet." And because they already had established branding, they became 1-800-Flowers.com, because people knew them by that phone number. Then, years later, people realize, "Hey, this virtual stuff is awesome, but there's still a market for people who want a florist that they can visit the old fashioned way, so let's make a brick and mortar store!" And this is the very thing they were offering an alternative to way back at the beginning. This was their thing. "We're a florist that doesn't exist in your neighborhood, but on the phone." But the store is now here, and because they went backwards, they kept the branding that they established with their higher tech ventures.

So, all these years later, we end up with a store that is called 1-800-Flowers.com.

Funny stuff, but not really that surprising. With technology, people have found that digital things don't always fully replace old-fashioned things. Sometimes it's the balance of the option of doing things both ways that works best. Some day soon I hope to self-publish this blog—less the typos—in a book format. And you know what I'm probably going to call it? "Heart and Mind: the blog book." A book, that will be named as such because it was originally a blog, which is, in fact, an alternative to an old fashioned book. It's the same kind of thing.

posted by Steve @ 9:23 PM