"Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded"

Yogi Berra made a famous observation about a NY restaurant: "Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded." At the end of one of the Sex and the City movies the characters are all sitting around drinking Cosmopolitans, their signature drink, which they apparently had not had for a while. Someone asked "Why did we ever stop drinking these?" to which someone replied "Because everyone else started."

Your network of friends might be the first to discover a great new restaurant, a good nail salon, or the up and coming cupcake place. It feels cool to be the one to discover a new, trendy spot, so you share the discovery with your friends. They like it, and soon share it with their friends. The network expands onward and outward until everybody knows about the "new, up and coming place" and then all of the sudden, it's not so up and coming -- it's just plain old normal. Some people don't mind going to hang out the place where everybody and anybody is, but some people like to frequent only the places where "everybody who's somebody" is.

There is a delicate balance between not enough people knowing about a place for it to be considered trendy, and too many people knowing about it for it to be considered trendy. I believe that this is why various venues tend to remodel their spaces, or rebrand their companies on such a frequent basis -- this ensures that they will stay fresh, interesting, and exciting in people's minds. Sometimes, though, this can backfire. There is something to be said about tradition, and going back to your favorite restaurant when visiting home won't feel the same if it has changed forty times. Consistency can keep a network together, and that is just as necessary as "changing to keep up with the times." Businesses need to take a careful inventory of the types of customers they attract to determine whether it would be more beneficial to be the constant within the network, or if they should be the innovator.