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The United States is a big place, so I’ll introduce you to a species native to my state of Virginia. Behold, the eastern coyote!That pretty boy up there (who’s a pretty boy?! You’re a pretty boy!!) is an eastern coyote, Canis latrans var. He’s sometimes called a coywolf, although that’s not quite accurate. He’s a coyote-wolf-dog hybrid, and he’s a brand new thing.You see, when European settlers came to the New World, the first thing they did was to Manifest Destiny all over the place by, among other things, eliminating the big predators — the wolves, bears, and cougars. That created a vacuum, and, as everyone knows, nature hates a vacuum. Almost as much as cats do.So, the coyote starts moving east. The coyote, for those not in the know, is a small wild canid that’s roughly the North American version of a jackal. An incredibly adaptable animal, as most scavengers are, the coyote’s growth (both in terms of population size and geographic distribution) was held at bay for millions of years by the bigger apex predators. Especially wolves. Wolves hate coyotes, and will hunt them down and kill them for fun. Coyotes return the favor by killing any unattended wolf pups they can get their teeth on. And so the cycle continues, like a really odd version of the Montagues and Capulets but with more fur. But then settlers start coming in and shooting any wolf they see. All of a sudden, wolves are all but extinct in the lower 48 states. And there’s nothing to stop the coyotes from spreading.They get as far as the Great Lakes, and run into a small population of their old enemy. But these wolves are desperate. You see, their numbers are in decline, and there aren’t enough other wolves around to make little baby wolves with. The coyotes are in trouble, too, because they’ve expanded far enough that there’s only a handful of them around. Suddenly, they go full Romeo and Juliet and produce all these adorable little abominations of nature. Some of them also breed with local dogs, to add that extra bit of “oomph” to the gene pool.The result is the eastern coyote — still roughly 80% coyote, but with varying degrees of wolf and dog in their genetic code as well. A little bigger and more robust than a regular coyote, but with all their ancestors’ cunning and adaptability. They spread to the Atlantic, then start heading south. Suddenly, there are coyotes everywhere.So grab a shotgun and eradicate them, right? Nope. Even though in most places (including my home state of Virginia) they’re considered a nuisance species and therefore can legally be shot or trapped in any season and with no bag limit, these little guys are extremely adaptable. Extremely. “Real” coyotes are adaptable enough, but then they mixed with wolves. Like a bad sci-fi movie, this gave them the special ability to adapt to more forested areas as well as the scrubland and savannah that is the coyote’s natural habitat. And remember those dogs they mutually swiped right on? Now they’re more at home in human-dominated environments. Really human-dominated environments.That’s the roof of a bar in Queens, New York City. The police were contacted, but the coyote disappeared before he could be captured.This little guy wasn’t so lucky. The officers tranquilized him, put him in the carrier, and took him to the local Animal Care and Control facility. There, he was checked over … and then released in the Bronx.You see, they’re all over New York City. And Washington D.C. And Baltimore. And just about every major city on the East Coast. Not to mention the ones in the countryside.So, are they dangerous? What do they eat? Most of these answers depend on who you ask. Ask a hunter, and they’ll say that they eat a lot of deer, and that the deer population is crashing because of it. Ask a suburbanite, and they’ll say that they eat a lot of neighborhood cats and small dogs. So Dana Morin, a doctoral student at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, spent two years studying game cameras, scat, and setting traps. She found that any venison in a coyote’s diet is from scavenging and the occasional fawn, and that the majority of their diet is rodents, rabbits, and berries. She also found that they’re extremely shy and non-confrontational; she very rarely tranquilizes the animals she catches, as she’s found that just draping a bed sheet over the animal is enough to subdue it, and she’s able to take samples and fit a radio collar without a struggle.What happens next remains to be seen. The population has more-or-less settled down, and is breeding almost exclusively within it’s own group. Any attempts at eradication are met with colossal failure; when the population starts to dip, the animals simply breed more often and bear larger litters. The possibility has been suggested of designating it as a new species, Canis oriens, meaning “eastern dog”.One thing is sure, however: the eastern coyote isn’t going anywhere any time soon.

Two things about me are pertinent to this answer:There is something “about” me that compels people to ask me for directions. Doesn’t matter where I am or how long I’ve been in a city. I’ve been asked for help everywhere from London, D.C., Boston and Brussels (where I generally know where I’m going) to Stockholm, Cologne, Frankfurt, Paris, New York, Barcelona and Antwerp (where I was/am much less familiar). Even if I’m with other people who do know the city — like traveling on the Tube with actual native Britons/Londoners — people will ask me before they’ll ask them. Apparently I “look like [I] know where [I’m] going.” People generally leave me alone (I have resting bitch face, alas), but when it comes to directions, they will ask. (And I do try to help or be up front if I don’t know. I think half the successful departures from Brussels Central from 2017–early 2019 were my doing.)No matter what I’m doing in London, my entry and exit points will be some combination of Paddington and St. Pancras stations. Paddington is the station I use when coming into London from where I live, and the station I took to get to my boyfriend when I visited him, before we got married. When I came into London from Brussels, I’d arrive at St. Pancras and then schlep over to Paddington (and I still use the St. Pancras Eurostar terminal when I go to Paris or Brussels). And when I lived in Reading and Canterbury, respectively, I’d use Paddington and St. Pancras to get to and from London. Essentially this means that my experience between those two stations (both on Tube lines and on the street) is pretty immense by now.*takes breath*All clear?I have been asked, multiple times and across the span of about ~12 years (from when I first lived in the U.K. for school to the present day), both on the Tube and at street level between Paddington and St. Pancras, for directions to and information about “the real” Sherlock Holmes’ house “on Baker Street.” This picked up especially in the early 2010s, when I was visiting London from Canterbury and the Benedict Cumberbatch “Sherlock” had started. I’ve also observed people at the Sherlock Holmes pub (which is tucked off a side street around Trafalgar Square) remark that it wasn’t on Baker Street and chatting (amongst themselves) wondering where “the real” Holmes lived and if it was possible to get a “tour” of “his house.”Now, there are a ton of Sherlock Holmes-themed things to do in London. My husband and I did a Moriarty scavenger hunt around Baker Street and Marylebone recently. There are literary-themed walking tours you can do, the aforementioned themed pub (which is darling, especially at Christmas) and a lot of shops/bookstores doing trivia nights or selling Holmes/Watson merch.But Sherlock Holmes is a fictional character who never actually “lived” anywhere, on Baker Street or otherwise. And I have encountered quite a few (American, sorry, fellow Americans) tourists who were shocked and surprised to learn this.Bonus story:About a year and a half ago I was in London with my now-husband and parents. We had seen “Hamlet” at the Globe and were going back to our rented accommodation. Our rented flat was on the Central line, so after the play we walked from the Globe over to the Tate Modern, crossed the Millennium Bridge and hunted for one of the entrances to the Tube at St. Paul’s.It had been a while since I’d been to St. Paul’s but I knew there were Tube station entrances at various points around it. It was dark and misty/drippy that night so visibility was pretty poor, plus we were cold and tired. For some reason, no matter how far we walked around, we could not find (as it turns out, see) a Tube entrance. We all had our Oyster cards out too, anticipating heading right into the station.As we keep roaming around the church looking for a Tube entrance, we see a couple of people heading our way in the opposite direction. Fed up at this point, I approached and asked them — expecting, at this time of night, to be speaking to Britons or at least city-dwellers — if they knew where St. Paul’s was. I should have said “St. Paul’s Tube” or “St. Paul’s station” or something, I know, but I was cold, wet, tired, cranky and I did have an Oyster card out and in my hand.The man of the couple deadass points straight to the monstrously huge and obviously “CATHEDRAL” cathedral to the immediate side of me and says in an American accent, “It’s right there.”We eventually found the Tube entrance. If we had walked a bit past the couple instead of stopping, we’d have run into one. And if visibility hadn’t been poor behind us, we’d have seen another one.

Meeting Expectations And The QuestHype is a relativistic designation.There are two fundamental expected branches:Consumer exceptions = metConsumer expectations = not metThe hype that gets the bad representation (Segway, Google Glass) is the hype that does not deliver and expectations are not met. The hype that meets or exceeds expectations is the hype that most people enjoy and find exciting (Apple, Tesla).Snap with their Spectacles product has certainly generated a new form of hype not just surrounding the product, but surrounding the marketing of the product by utilizing new marking system centered around a vending machine, called Snapbot [1].The Ingredients Of A Spectacles HypeSnapbots are currently located randomly around the country along with a single pop-up store directly across from Apple’s flagship store in New York City. The locations are surfaced and discovered via a website featuring a scavenger hunt type of marketing system not quite ever seen before.Thus the hype surrounding Snap Spectacles is twofold: the actual product and it's artificially constrained supply and the sales and marketing of the product via the Snapbot vending machines.Extending The Snapchat ExperienceSnap is in a unique position to become a hardware company. They are building on a wildly successful social media platform. So it's important to know the context of what Spectacles are; an extension to the Snapchat experience. Snapchat, since its inception, using ephemeral pictures and video has been about capturing a moment and perhaps making that moment disappear.Spectacles are a way to capture in-the-moment video without the need to pull out a phone, open the app and press record [2]. This allows an effortless connection to the moment and the subject and not the cognitive and mechanical load necessary to record the moment.It is clear that the product was not invented in a vacuum, it was a reaction to solving a true problem for Snapchat users. The amount of time taken to capture a moment nearly always required a restating and posing. Spectacles solves a real problem [2].Solving The In-The-Moment ProblemThe lesson to be learned about snap spectacles as a product is to focus deeply on users and solving significant problems that may not have self identified without empirical observations. Is quite unusual to see such a masterful stroke of observation in product development and to ignore what seems to be conventional thinking that other more well-positioned hardware companies can do something better, example "the iPhone already has a camera". This took bold thinking and courage. This along with a playful and casual presentation, example the snap CEO calling spectacles a toy, cemented the idea of spectacles as something fun and exciting.The Unique Design Brand SignalingThe hype is also intensified by the uniqueness in the design of the sunglasses. When wearing the snap spectacles the little yellow circles near each temple allows one to be identified easily in public. This is just like the experience we saw in the early 2000s with the famous iPod unique white headphones. Because spectacles are still relatively in short supply and exceedingly difficult to acquire, the sighting of somebody wearing spectacles is actually a bit of a spectacle.The Theatrical Buying ExperienceThe unique Snapbot buying experience immediately identifies the purchase of the product to be quite unlike the purchase of any other product in the similar pricing category. It's very likely the central cohort of snap users, between 24 years old and 12 years old have never purchased anything over a few dollars from the vending machine. Snapbot has become an iconic character with an attitude and personality all emoted via sounds and a huge monocle blinking and emotive eye that also allows the user to virtually try on a pair of Spectacles before ordering.The multi media experience Snap created also contributes to the experience and the hype factor as friends and strangers mill around to have a group experience. Snap has successfully duplicated some elements of the early Apple iPhone by experiences where dedicated users would line up sometimes weeks in advance to be one of the first to acquire the new products.“It’s Just A Toy”Founder, Evan Spiegel announced that spectacles was a bit of a toy and an experiment this extended the possibility that the product would be an extremely constrained supply availability. By signaling the idea that Snap created Spectacles to be a toy, it sets the tone of an anti-hero narrative that has already become iconic.The Press: “Wha? They just released a new product on a Friday night?”Finally snap has used unconventional times to release information not only about the new direction of the company but also about the availability of the product. This created a bit of a feeding frenzy for the press and media outlets trying to cover A major news event event on a Friday evening.When we take all of the elements in consideration is very unlikely but a handful of companies could have generated as much hype and interest around what is essentially medium grade high end sunglass with a unique fisheye camera lens.The Quest And The Classic Story TemplateOne can equate the release of Spectacles and the hype generated to the basic three-act structure [3] that divides a classic story into three distinct parts that weaves a familiar Quest theme:The Setup- The Pre Release hypeThe Confrontation-The constrained supply and the scavenger huntThe Solution-Wider release and adoptionThis is a basic template that many professional writers use to build a story. It is also the template that Steve Jobs used, consciously or unconsciously to build Apple products and the demand around them. This was part of Steve’s “Reality distortion effect”. He used it constantly during his keynotes, in fact the words hype and Steve Jobs were interchangeable in the early years of Apple. This is a metaphorical journey/quest of the protagonist who encounters a problem, experiences conflict because of the problem, and then resolves that conflict at the end. The protagonist is the user, a bit of a reluctant hero and they are positioned so that they are part of a story—an adventure. They are guided through the three-act structure, especially through the Confrontation to Climax.This story narrative has been used as far back as the earliest mythological allegories. Many of the elements of Spectacles and the way it is marketed send the protagonist and the company on a three act quest.Thus Spectacles are:Solving a real problem of in-the-moment recordingPerfectly priced to be accessible to the primary cohortMade to meet or exceed quality expectationsSignals a social connection by wearing them, like the iPod headphone cablesConstrained supply allows tastemakers to highly influence othersConnects software to hardware in a perfect wayUnorthodox press announcements creates more interestTheatrical buying experience, the unique vending machineGamified scavenger hunt buying with countdown timersApple-like lines of anticipation from primary usersThe Final ActAs of early December, 2016 snap has not only met the height level but it exceeded the hype level. Is clear the company will continue on creating more hardware products and more advanced versions of spectacles. Some of these products will be augmented reality with voice first interactions. If the company can continue to build heightened expectations and there is strong evidence they can, there is little doubt that the hype they have created will go down in history one of the most successful product launches.“What are the marketing lessons than can be learned from the hype that surrounded the launch of Snap's Spectacles?”The fundamental lesson is; the release of Snap Spectacles will be the textbook example of how hype, if done correctly, is one of the most powerful forces in business.[1] Brian Roemmele's answer to What’s the story about Snap’s new Snapbot vending machines selling Spectacles?[2] Brian Roemmele's answer to What are Snap, Inc. Spectacles and why are they important?[3] The Three-Act Structure