When I was writing a previous book, The invisible grail, I decided to write one chapter while traveling from home to work, day after day, on the London Underground. In my mind, I had discovered a version of “the third place.” Starbucks has long considered that it provides the third place for its customers, a welcoming, accepting environment between home and work. Perhaps we all need a third place, in whatever form we find it, because it is a space for our minds to feel at ease. For previous generations it might have been the pub or the club; for people today it might be the bar or the gym. Perhaps more by luck than design, Starbucks found itself positioned as the perfect third place for the late twentieth century.
When Howard Schultz began to think about it, he was surprised that the original idea of Italian-style espresso bars had grown into a completely new paradigm. Clearly, the idea was now much bigger and more powerful than he had first imagined. A need was being fulfilled, and that need could not be expressed as “for people who love a great cup of coffee.” There was a deeper resonance at work here.
A number of people inside and outside Starbucks started to think about this. Ray Oldenburg, a Florida sociologist, wrote an influential book called The great good place. He described the need for informal public spaces where people can come together. Perhaps the European coffee houses had played such a role in the past; perhaps American barber shops had performed a similar function. The theory was based on the observation that urban life brings together great masses of people but often leaves individuals feeling isolated in the crowd.
To some extent, all successful brands are social. They bring people together and enable them to identify with others in a crowd without losing their sense of individuality. Some of the most iconic brands capture this duality of individual sociability: Guinness, for example. By drawing on your inner strength, you become all the more individual and true to your own personality while relating more successfully to all the other individuals around you. It is difficult, perhaps impossible, for brands to succeed by appealing purely to the loner. One of the most famous brand failures was a 1950s cigarette launched with heavy advertising and the slogan: “You’re never alone with a Strand.” People did not want a life where satisfaction was defined as being on your own with only a cigarette for company.
As the Starbucks brand has developed, the notion of the third place has become more entrenched. The music, the seating, the level of ambient noise allow you to feel included in the social place even when you are on your own. One of the conclusions drawn by an advertising agency pitching for Starbucks’ business in the early 1990s was that people go to Starbucks for a “social feeling.” This was despite the observation that the vast majority of Starbucks customers made no conversation or social interaction in the store. Come in, order, take away or sit down; there is no pressure to be sociable. Indeed, it is this absence of pressure that characterizes the third place and makes it a haven for many.
At the same time, many regard Starbucks as a gathering place where you can either collect your thoughts or meet your friends. If you are meeting friends, the third place takes on a more obviously social meaning. It also provides a setting that has just enough hint of the exotic to be different from home or work (the smell and the sight of coffee beans) and just enough likeness to be familiar (seats and tables that are slightly more or less comfortable than those at your work or home). It provides an environment that is socially “democratic,” where the male business executive sits in the same space as the mum taking a break from shopping, or students getting together after classes.
In 1992, Starbucks was realizing the traveling power of these ideas. It now knew that its offer worked in north-west America, Chicago and California. If there, why not elsewhere? The only thing that might stop it was a lack of resources to expand and the fear that, if it did not grow soon, the big boys in the coffee world would wake from their slumbers and put an end to the romance. The romance was still an integral part of the company, but there was now a perpetual tension between the functional efficiency required to run the business and the need to keep achieving big dreams that ensured the company had a soul. The decision to go public, to raise funds by floating the company on the New York stock exchange, was taken to meet both needs. Investment would help the business run better and, at the same time, enable it to achieve its ambitions on a national and international scale. These ambitions were to reinvent the coffee experience in America and to build a worldwide brand.
In many ways, the offer that Starbucks put to Wall Street was the opposite of what would normally appeal to the stockbrokers there. Howard Schultz was unwilling to compromise his belief that Starbucks was strong because it was built on deeply felt values. Yet he recognized that Wall Street does not put a value on values. Orin Smith provided a sober, dispassionate counterbalance to Howard’s emotional argument. The investment bankers appointed to place the listing did the rest. Even though technology companies were the flavor of the day and even though Starbucks was unknown in New York, the shares finished trading on their first day at $21.50, at least $4.50 above the target price. (The ipo price was $17.00.) The company was now worth $273 million, having been bought for $4 million five years earlier.
The business now had its immediate investment needs sorted out, and a mechanism in place to raise further funds in the future. It could concentrate on meeting its aims, and the expansion plan could proceed at a fast pace. Fifty new stores opened in 1992 and 100 in 1993, including Washington DC as the first location on the east coast. But competition was growing. The basic components of the Starbucks model were easy to imitate. The espresso business was easy to enter. To open an espresso bar became an attainable dream for many American victims of corporate downsizing.
Starbucks had its Seattle experience to draw on. The phenomenon there had been that Starbucks had grown the market for coffee drinking. The original “mom and pop” coffee shop continued to thrive. New competitors to Starbucks came in, and the good ones survived. But Starbucks itself seemed to feed off the market conditions it created. Despite constant predictions that the market in individual cities could not sustain so many coffee shops, another Starbucks would open and it would soon fill with people.
The reader can assume that, for the rest of this narrative, new Starbucks shops continued to open. Fewer than 10 shops in 1987 had grown to more than 7,500 in 2003, a phenomenal expansion. The details of that story are not what will concern us for the rest of this book because the pattern had by now been established and would be repeated. The foundations of the brand were strong, enabling growth on solid ground. From here on, we will focus on decisive moments that have tested the brand and demonstrated both its fundamental strength and its ability to keep changing in a positive way.
Growth presents any brand with a challenge to its core products. Are these products inviolable and immutable? Should they adapt over time in response to new trends or developing customer tastes? The traditionalist Starbucks view, inherited from its founding fathers, was that the coffee itself was sacred. There was an Italian way that had become the Starbucks way, and no deviation from it would be countenanced. The debate came to a head over the issue of low-fat milk. The purist view had it that Starbucks’ lattes and cappuccinos should be made only with whole-fat milk; the coffee tasted better that way. But many customers disagreed and wanted skimmed milk, whether for taste or health reasons. If denied it, they simply went to a rival coffee shop down the road.
For Howard Schultz and many others, this was a fundamental brand issue. It was for Howard Behar too, but he had a more flexible view and as always championed the customer’s cause. As long as the coffee itself remained true to Starbucks’ quality standards, customers should be allowed to customize their drinks in whatever way they wanted. So the skinny latte was born, and today it outsells the whole-milk version.
This step ushered in a whole range of product development possibilities. Syrups of different flavors had already been introduced, although a firm decision had been taken never to add artificial flavors to the beans themselves.* But a more significant piece of product development was under development in 1994. As I write these words in the Starbucks store on the corner of 4th and Seneca in Seattle, I suspect that one of the biggest changes over the past ten years has been the nature and size of the menu. It is still not vast compared to, say, the all-encompassing choice of a New York diner where the menu can be the start of further exploration and negotiation, but you can have an extraordinary variety of coffee-based drinks. And Frappuccino now has a panel of the menu board all to itself.
In 1994, presented with the prototype that was to become Frappuccino, Howard Schulz’s instinct was to reject it. The idea for the beverage had originated in southern California, no doubt spurred by the temperature. Customers wanted a cold drink. Starbucks offered a cold latte with ice cubes. Nearby coffee shops offered coffee granitas. Dina Campion was the district manager for 10 Starbucks stores around Santa Monica, and she obtained a blender that she installed in one of her stores. This filled a gap but everyone involved realized the experiment needed development, so it was taken to the R&D department in Seattle.
The department developed a product that used powder, and offered it back to the Californian stores. Rather than smiling and being polite to the management, two other Starbucks partners, Ann Ewing and Greg Rogers, then carried out their own development of the drink. First to go was the powder, replaced by freshly brewed coffee. Variations were made in the other ingredients and the blending process: lowfat milk, more ice, longer blending time. When they tried the result out on customers, it got an enthusiastic response.
Soon the drink was presented to Howard Behar alongside the “official” powder-based version. He had no doubts, and saw that customers preferred the unofficial version, too. Additional development and customer research led to further refinements, and Frappuccino was launched in all Starbucks in the summer of 1995. The name was simply a piece of good fortune. The previous year, Starbucks had acquired a Boston company called The Coffee Connection that had an unsuccessful drink called Frappuccino. The combination of frappé (from the French, meaning “chilled”) with cappuccino gave the name all the advantages of being meaningful, understandable and easy to say.
The importance of the Frappuccino story is that it showed Starbucks developing a significant new product for the first time in its history. It developed the product by keeping true to its brand principles. The development process used the creativity and innovation of Starbucks partners, who listened hard to customers. The new product was based on fresh coffee, so Frappuccino was seen as a coffee beverage, not a milk one. And, of course, it was an amazing commercial success, with Starbucks selling $52 million of Frappuccinos in the first full year of operation (7 percent of annual revenues at that time).
There was more to come. Late in 1994, Starbucks and Pepsi formed the North American Coffee Partnership to create new coffee-related products for mass distribution in bottles or cans. The first result of this partnership was a fizzy coffee drink called Mazagran which sounds as if you should be obtaining it on prescription from your pharmacy. Although some people claimed that it tasted really good, sales were slow and the joint venture was wobbling. The in-store success of Frappuccino came to the rescue. It was agreed that, if a version of Frappuccino could be developed that tasted like the store-made version and then sold in a bottle with an acceptable shelf life, Pepsi would put it into production and distribute it nationally. The technical problems were overcome and, launched on a wave of confidence, Frappuccino went on sale in west coast supermarkets in 1996 without any test marketing. In fact, the partnership wildly underestimated the appeal of Frappuccino. It sold so well that they had to withdraw marketing support and then halt production until manufacturing capacity could be increased to meet the level of demand. Starbucks made its then largest investment in a new bottling plant. In summer 1997, Frappuccinos were launched into supermarkets nationwide.
The relationship with Pepsi throws up some interesting questions about the Starbucks brand. Starbucks believes in people and communities, and acts on that belief through volunteering and practical action. The focus of each Starbucks store is local. The company has become big, but remains focused on the small. In many ways Pepsi seems its antithesis: one of those juggernaut American brands that crushes all before it. Howard Schultz insists that experience has proved otherwise. Starbucks has undoubtedly gained an enormous increase in its reach through its partnership with Pepsi, but it has not had to compromise any element of its products or brand. You cannot buy a Pepsi-Cola in Starbucks stores because a big-name brand would detract from the Starbucks brand. The only advantage to Pepsi seems to be the commercial one of being able to turn a profit from bottling and distributing Starbucks’ products. On the other hand Starbucks takes decisions that are in its commercial interest, but it will never take a commercial decision (however financially attractive it might seem) if that decision risks undermining the Starbucks brand and culture in any way.
In late 2003, Howard Schultz told me a story from around the time of the Pepsi partnership. The boss of a national cable company met Howard and within minutes of the meeting starting, laid a blank cheque on the table in front of him. “Here you are, fill in whatever figure you want,” said the cable man. Howard asked what Starbucks would have to give in return. “Let us install monitors and broadcast TV in the corners of your stores.” The cheque remained blank and was pushed back across the table. TVs would destroy the idea of the third place on which the brand was based.
In 1995, the possibility of another joint venture presented itself, and this too was controversial. It called into question the balance between the integrity of the brand and commercial growth. A brand that is to grow, and continue growing, depends absolutely on trust, particularly the trust vested in it by its own people and by customers. The decision to serve Starbucks’ coffee on United Airlines’ planes threatened to undermine that trust.
The decision came about because United discovered, as every airline must know, that its customers hated its coffee. United wanted to do something about it, so talks started with Starbucks about supplying coffee that would be brewed and dispensed at more than 30,000 feet. The potential advantage to United was clear: its customers would have better coffee and another reason to be loyal to United. The potential advantage to Starbucks was also clear: it would double the number of people it was reaching. But the potential disadvantage to Starbucks was equally clear. If it could not deliver an improvement in the quality of the airline coffee, its brand and reputation would be severely damaged. This was a high-risk strategy, and many people in Starbucks were anxious and uncertain about it.
The figures were certainly tempting. United flew 80 million people a year on 500 planes to all parts of the world. Up to 40 percent of them asked for coffee. There’s an awful lot of coffee in the air, and a lot of awful coffee, too. The prospect of reaching and educating an extra 20 million or more people was irresistible, particularly for a company about to embark on a program of international expansion. The Starbucks brand could travel the world to reach new markets without even opening an overseas store.
If the figures were tempting, the challenges were daunting. Extra new equipment on board seemed unlikely to be acceptable given that airlines try constantly to reduce weight. Water quality would vary according to the country where it was taken on board. Over 22,000 flight attendants would need to be trained as baristas.
At first, Starbucks turned down the opportunity because the risks were too high. What use would 20 million captive customers be if their first encounter with Starbucks left the impression that it made terrible coffee? United was upset by the decision, and kept trying to convince Starbucks of its sincerity and willingness to meet the standards needed. Negotiations resumed. United bent over backwards to get Starbucks on board.
Eventually a deal was done that gave Starbucks an unusual degree of quality control over its bigger partner’s operation. Equipment would be improved; all flight attendants would be specially trained; a quality-assurance program covering every aspect of coffee-making would be introduced. United was paying for all this, and also for an advertising campaign in major business media to promote the fact that Starbucks’ coffee would now be served on United planes. The ad line ran: “After all, we don’t just work here. We have to drink the coffee, too.” For the first time Starbucks had the exposure of national advertising, and it did not have to pay for it.
Everything seemed set fair, but it started badly. There were teething problems with phasing out old stocks of coffee and with the operation of the equipment. The coffee still tasted bad. Starbucks insisted that United had to improve. And within months, United did. After a few months a survey showed that 71 percent of coffee drinkers described the coffee as excellent or good.*
Starbucks had changed in an extraordinary way. It could no longer see itself or be seen as a little regional company. It was a public company performing well on Wall Street; it was in partnership with some of the biggest names in corporate America; it was being talked about in every part of the US even though its actual coverage was patchy. It had also undergone another paradigm shift. In 1984, the first shift had meant that Starbucks offered a coffee experience, not just coffee beans. Now, in the middle 1990s, it had moved its products and brand outside the four walls of its stores into different places where it could reach many more people without needing to increase resources massively.
At this point it was clear that Starbucks had to do two things. First, it needed to take the logical step of international expansion, to step off one of those United planes into a foreign country and test the concept there. Howard Behar was put in charge of international development. Second, Starbucks had to get serious about marketing. Howard Schultz was a marketing man by instinct, and his instinct told him that he needed help to keep Starbucks moving forward in ways that remained true to his understanding of the brand that he had created. He knew that the brand was now out of his control – it was out there being represented by thousands of partners who had bought his vision – but he also knew that nothing was more crucial to the continuing success of the business than continuing belief in the brand. Reinvention was the word he used and still uses to describe the next challenge for Starbucks. In his own words:
The problems facing Starbucks as it grew were typical of many businesses.
The questions it asked itself can usefully be asked by other businesses too.
“The issues became far more complex. Can a company double and even triple its size but stay true to its values? How far can you extend a brand before you dilute it? How do you innovate without compromising your legacy? How do you create widespread trial and awareness without losing control? How do you stay entrepreneurial even as you develop professional management? How do you keep pushing through on long-term initiatives when short-term problems demand immediate attention? How do you continue to provide customers with a sense of discovery when you’re growing at the speed of light? How do you maintain your company’s soul when you also need systems and processes?”
These were the questions Starbucks was having to ask itself, and sometimes it struggled with the answers. Howard’s concerns could serve as a checklist for any young, dynamic company to use. Any manager of a growing brand needs to find the answers. A marketing director would be best placed to answer them, but Starbucks had no marketing director. Indeed it had done very little marketing in the conventional sense of the word, although it had carried out an enormous amount of brand building. Conventional marketing does not drive Starbucks in the way that it drives, say, Coca-Cola. Starbucks has always operated on minuscule advertising budgets. In advertising terms, if Coca-Cola’s budget makes it American through and through, Starbucks’ is the spending equivalent of a third-world country. But Starbucks has never needed to advertise heavily. The brand has spread through word of mouth, PR and community activities. Why advertise to lure people to a new store when people are already queueing for a coffee? In 10 years Starbucks spent $10 million on advertising; Coca-Cola spends that in less than a day.
But by 1995, there were some worrying signs. The company had grown at an astronomical rate, but independent research and observations suggested that Starbucks was starting to be seen as corporate and predictable, inaccessible and irrelevant. This was a shock to Howard Schultz, who has a highly personal identification with the Starbucks brand. Because he believes so passionately that Starbucks is based on individuality and diversity, and on its ability to create communities, any criticism of Starbucks becomes a personal slight. The research findings reinforced the need to have a senior marketing executive on board.
Scott Bedbury was identified as the person for the job. Having made his name at Nike, he came to Starbucks after a lot of persuasion from Howard Schultz. He had helped Nike grow through a clear concentration on what the brand was really about, combined with innovative marketing campaigns and hefty advertising programs. From his time there (1987–94) came the internal brand mantra “Authentic athletic performance” to act as a touchstone for judging activities as true or false to the brand. The external expression of this single-mindedness was the line “Just do it’” which has since become inseparable from Nike. It serves as a good example of the need for brands to be consistent and committed to their core ideas. The truth is, more or less any company in the 1980s could have come up with “Just do it” and fitted it to their brand. But only Nike did it and kept just doing it; and, as in sport, the more they practiced, the luckier they got.
Scott Bedbury left Nike in 1994 with the intention of writing a book about brands based on his own experiences. He was using a log cabin as a writer’s retreat when Howard Schultz rang him. He was invited to Seattle and eventually agreed to become chief marketing executive for Starbucks at the beginning of 1995. He stayed for three years before independent consultancy, and that shelved project to write a book, lured him away again. But in that time he helped Starbucks to raise its game to a new level.
Scott found Starbucks a completely different animal from Nike. He was given a marketing budget of just $5 million, the sort of figure that would see Nike through a few days of advertising in a quiet period. So he needed to husband his resources and spend his money wisely.
The first thing he needed was more information, so he embarked on a process he called The Big Dig. He recruited an ex-colleague, Jerome Conlon, who had been Nike’s head of consumer insights. For the next nine months they carried out – in a very hands-on way because there was no budget – a comprehensive research study into the way customers and potential customers regarded Starbucks. They discovered many things, some worrying, some reassuring, and started to get a feel for who made up the Starbucks audience. It seemed that Starbucks was meeting the needs of 30- and 40-year-olds, but not really reaching out to younger groups, in particular college students. Above all, it was not getting its story across well: people became interested or even converted once they heard more.
The most important insight from the research was that coffee is always much more than just a drink. It’s surrounded by emotion. It comes with an experience and an expectation of its own: partly to do with the kind of coffee house where you now expect to drink it, partly to do with the long tradition of European coffee houses.
The conclusion reached was that the core of the Starbucks brand was less about making a great cup of coffee than with providing a great experience accompanied by coffee. This was a conclusion that the original founders of Starbucks might have felt uncomfortable with. For them it was all about supplying a product and educating customers in the ways of choosing and making the best coffee. The message for Starbucks in 1995 was different. Of course, the coffee itself still mattered: the fact that the beans were carefully grown, selected, roasted, brewed with good water and not allowed to stew in the style of the traditional US diner. But all this seemed pretty obvious to customers: Starbucks sells coffee. We know it’s good coffee. What about everything else? This is in no way to deny the importance of the product. Getting the coffee right is the basis of establishing trust, which then gives your brand permission to connect people to other possibilities and establish deeper relationships. But the product is not the brand; it is simply an important part of the brand experience.
Scott Bedbury was able to use the knowledge gained from The Big Dig to add richness and clarity to the Starbucks brand. The research supported the brand’s values but suggested that Starbucks was not being particularly effective in communicating them. Starbucks should be able to develop a style of advertising, even if not a scale of advertising, that would attract more notice and affection. The Big Dig also provided a foundation of information on which Starbucks could now start to design the store of the future. The architectural and design team played creatively with the possibilities, coming up with color palettes, stories about the sea and myths about sirens, illustrations and photographs, textures and textiles, furniture and accessories. As they did so they started to create mood boards, sticking fragments of words and images down until they evolved into the mural styles that are still current in Starbucks stores today.
The design exploration was given guidance and parameters. First, to delve deep into the brand, building on knowledge from The Big Dig. Second, to learn from fast-food outlets but to discard most of that learning, keeping only what would sit with Starbucks values. Third, to create a more expansive palette of colors and imagery. Finally, as if in total contradiction, to reduce costs by 25 percent. Tough and contradictory as it looked, the brief hung together with the findings from research: that, for example, students wanted Starbucks to be funkier, a freer spirit, a place where they could hang out without feeling the pressure of a fast-food outlet’s speed, high-tech efficiency and glaring lighting. They wanted a place for people, not a place to be processed as a customer unit.
The question being asked was challenging. How do you open 300 stores a year, each one of them distinctive and designed to fit the tone of the local neighborhood? It was a heartfelt and increasingly urgent question as the pace of store openings quickened and international openings added a further complication to the mix. Store design changed more radically than might have been expected, given the pressures on time and cost. Rather than moving towards greater uniformity – neat solutions that could be packaged and rolled out – design generated a new sense of creativity and adventure, influenced by and influencing the kinds of space being acquired. There was movement towards grand cafés, flagship stores with fireplaces and architectural features, mixing high ceilings with comfortable alcoves. Into these spaces were introduced leather chairs, fabric-covered sofas, newspapers and an attitude of non-conformity.
Structure and discipline were needed, however. These were provided by the brand itself. Difficult decisions were referred to the brand’s principles and values. For example, what kind of cups should coffee be served from? Though polystyrene was much cheaper, recyclable paper cups with a paper sleeve were chosen; they looked nicer and were better for the environment. Customers drinking coffee in the store would still be given porcelain cups because they added pleasure to the experience. Other companies would take different decisions – to cut costs, to ignore the environmental impact – but that way you end up in a business without soul and one that is not really sustainable in the long term. The expedient decisions you make undermine all sense of differentiation and personality, and give people little reason to like you and stay loyal. A brand is a hard taskmaster, forcing companies to live up to their principles or forfeit the trust on which they depend.
Graphic design imposed its own disciplines that also derived from the brand. Grasping the need to embrace diversity and respect individuality, the Starbucks design team rejected the sterile option of a single look for all the stores. They explored and developed variations drawing on the four elements of earth, fire, water and air, which were then related to four stages of coffee-making: grow, roast, brew and aroma. This provides an intellectual and aesthetic elegance, but is it too neat? Why is “aroma” a stage of coffee making rather than, say, “serve”? The answer is that Starbucks is interested in the senses so that it can create a true coffee experience. Aroma is integral to the coffee itself.
Does it work in practice? It does, because it provides a rich matrix of possibilities, all anchored to core ideas in the Starbucks brand. For example, the color palettes offer consistency within variety. The “grow” design scheme is predominantly green. “Roast” is shades of red and brown. “Brew” brings in more blue for water. And “aroma” is lighter pastels, with yellows, greens and whites. But the idea is for each scheme to work harmoniously with the others, so in many ways the quintessential Starbucks design is for a shop that is spacious and separated into different compartments, rich in the diversity of the design but deep in its sources. Other design disciplines follow this lead. Different materials can be specified for furniture within each of the themes, but these are not a set list. You can vary them, adding or discarding elements to make a store idiosyncratic.
Even within Seattle the contrast the design achieves while maintaining a clear Starbucks feel is impressive. The store on 23rd and Jackson, in a predominantly African-American area famous for its jazz history, has a community-painted mural on one wall with black and white photographs from the 1940s all around. The photos – stylish shots by Al Smith of Quincy Jones, Ray Charles and other jazz greats who played in the area – provide a backdrop for new musical activity from the students of the neighboring arts college.
Just a few miles down the road, the neighborhood of Belltown is completely different, and so is the store. Belltown is like New York’s SoHo: bohemian, arty and laid back. The Art Institute of Seattle is nearby and its students hang their works on one wall of the store, creating exhibitions that change every two months. If paintings are sold, the money goes direct to the student artists. The collegiate, artistic feel continues with the furniture, old if not antique, with another wall featuring individual mirrors in ornate frames. The whole is designed like the extension of a living room inhabited by Armistead Maupin’s Mrs Madrigal.
In between these shops are scores of others, all individual and different, yet all unmistakably Starbucks. It’s a difficult trick for any brand to pull off, but Starbucks does it not just across one American city but every US state and 32 different countries.
The foundations were made strong by the work of Scott Bedbury. The greatest advantage from the kind of information followed by analysis that Scott instituted was that from 1996 onwards, and perhaps for the first time, Starbucks had a rational means of making decisions about how to develop its business. The brand provided a touchstone, a steady guide to decision making. Previously Starbucks had relied simply on the intuition of Howard Schultz and its own people. Those who “got” the brand but could not articulate it, and those who did not “get” the brand and so could not fully accept its obligations, were sometimes left agonizing. As Starbucks got bigger, the danger that people would not have that intuitive understanding grew. The wrong decisions could easily be made for perfectly good reasons. For example, opportunities kept coming up to sell more volume through a partnership, and to make more money as a result. Now, with a stronger sense of what the brand stood for, it was easier to say no to ventures that might make money in the short term but destroy reputation in the longer term.
A tool that Scott Bedbury imported from Nike was the brand mantra. This is simply a short phrase – not a strapline that runs in advertising – that sets out the essence of the brand. It is not something that the outside world ever sees or hears through direct communication. Indeed, many of the internal audience may never hear the mantra presented, although they should all be able to recognize its truth. But the philosophy behind it is never frame it, never put it on the wall.
For Starbucks, the equivalent of Nike’s “Authentic athletic performance” became “Rewarding everyday moments.” No mention of coffee, although the mantra clearly fits with the idea of treating yourself to a coffee, a Frappuccino, a tea, a juice, a muffin, a quiet read or an animated conversation. As a description, it is tight enough to the brand but also baggy enough to allow creative development over time. The mantra works because it taps into the emotional triggers of the brand, the need to reward ourselves in stressful times, to rise above the humdrum, to see the possibility of the extraordinary in the ordinary. When we drink a cup of coffee in Starbucks we are fulfilling a deeper need than the quenching of thirst. As Scott Bedbury put it: “Consciously or not, we seek experiences that make us think, that make us feel, that help us grow, and that enrich our lives in some way.”
The longevity of this approach was brought home to me in October 2003, eight years after The Big Dig. I visited the newly refurbished Hayward Gallery on London’s South Bank to see an art exhibition. Afterward, I went into the new Starbucks located inside the gallery. It’s an elegant little shop, with stylish furniture that sits with the feel of an art gallery, providing “the finest coffee and stimulating art in a space where you can be inspired, connect, escape and enjoy.” And on the chalk board, the following words have been handwritten by the barista: “Starbucks at the Hayward. Art demands time and thought. Good excuse for a muffin.”
* In 2003 Starbucks bought Seattle’s Best Coffee, a smaller local company that flavors its beans. The SBC shops are not adopting the Starbucks brand and will continue selling flavored beans.
* Having just flown to Seattle on United, I can say that the partnership is still working and the coffee is good, although it still tastes better on the ground.