Elizabeth Newton was a psychology grad student at Stanford in 1990, and she ran an experiment that takes ten seconds to explain and has been quietly ruining people's confidence ever since.
Two chairs, one table. One person taps out a song everybody knows on the tabletop — Happy Birthday, the national anthem — and the other person listens and guesses.
Before any guessing started, Newton asked the tappers how many they figured would get identified. They said about half.
The listeners got 3 out of 120. Two and a half percent.
Because the tapper isn't tapping, not in their own head. They've got the whole song running, melody and words and the arrangement underneath it. What crosses the table is knocking.
The distance between 50% and 2.5% is the distance between knowing something and being able to hand it to somebody else, and the tapper never feels an inch of it. They walk away thinking the listener wasn't trying. We do this constantly. We never once notice.
Zaxbys just opened on the Upper East Side.
In Georgia that sentence needs no explanation. In Manhattan it's a name on a building nobody can pronounce with confidence. Corporate has twenty years of loyalty playing in their heads. The guy walking past has never heard the song.
And the openings keep coming:
- Zaxbys crossed 1,000 restaurants across 22 states and wants 100 new ones a year
- Whataburger is entering four new states: Nevada, Tennessee, Missouri, Kansas
- Marco's Pizza is targeting 80-plus openings
Every one of them is a tapper.
Somebody has to do the translation, and today's idea is the shop that does it. The New-Market Launch Desk turns a chain's corporate assets into localized TikTok and Reels campaigns for each new city, answering the only questions a first-timer actually has. What is this? Why do people elsewhere care? What do I order?
Franchise grand-opening budgets already run $15,000 to $25,000 per location. Eight clients on $7,500 retainers is $60K MRR, and the pipeline announces itself in public every time a chain signs a development agreement.
Read the full playbook here:
Zaxbys opened in Manhattan, where nobody knows the brand. Regional restaurant chains now cross state lines faster than their reputations, and franchise grand-opening budgets are sitting unspent.
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