“And so Starbuck found Ahab with a general chart of the oriental archipelagoes spread before him; and another separate one representing the long eastern coasts of the Japanese islands – Niphon, Matsmai, and Sikoke. With his snow-white new ivory leg braced against the screwed leg of his table, and with a long pruning-hook of a jack-knife in his hand, the wondrous old man, with his back to the gangway door, was wrinkling his brow, and tracing his old courses again.”

Herman Melville’s words from Moby-Dick have the ring of mad adventure about them. Another spirit of adventure has taken the modern Starbucks in different directions around the world, and with a different mission. But there is still something obsessive and all-consuming about Starbucks’ quest for new territories for its coffee houses.

Starbucks has come further faster than anyone imagined it might. It now employs more than 80,000 people, but still wants to think of itself as a small company. The truth is that Starbucks has grown from a small fish to the proportions of a whale, with the systems and logistical network of a big company. Yet for a vertically integrated company it has become remarkably successful at maintaining quality at every stage of its process, from bean to barista. Its friendly efficiency means that customers stay loyal, visiting Starbucks 18 times a month on average in North America. The equity of the brand continues to have a life of its own, building reputation and trust and enabling Starbucks to keep developing. Part of the company’s strength is that it trusts its own people; the likelihood is that the future big idea will come from the imagination of a barista located in whatever proves to be Starbucks’ next port of call. Even more certainly that idea will be based around coffee and coffee drinking. Starbucks loves imagination, but is absolutely focused on its core product as the anchor for everything it does.

With good reason, because the coffee effect has been astonishing. The drinking of real coffee has been democratized by Starbucks. In America, and throughout the world, it has filled the gap between the coffee slob and the coffee snob, and made good-quality coffee widely available on a daily basis. It has become a mass-market brand, leaving its flanks exposed to critics on one side (“Too expensive, too upmarket; I prefer instant”) or the other (“The coffee’s no good”). Coffee snobs like Frasier Crane, living in Seattle, will look down their noses at Starbucks in an effort to maintain their self-image of refinement and tasteful discrimination. They do this while enjoying, in Café Nervosa, all the benefits of ambience and sociability that have been made possible by Starbucks’ development of the coffee-drinking marketplace.

Starbucks has been a success almost everywhere in the world it has traded. Its international sales are expected to overtake its domestic US sales – a harder trick to pull off for a brand based on human experiences across the counter than it would be for brands based more on volumes of mechanical transactions. You feel that if McDonald’s could find a way to simplify the transaction and do without people altogether, it would. With Starbucks, the transaction itself is almost incidental.

Some people argue that Starbucks grows by manipulation and exploitation; some dedicate websites to their hatred of Starbucks. There is a body of opinion that says all commercial activity involves an effort of persuasion that is manipulative. But is Starbucks more manipulative than most? One fact that suggests not is its low advertising spend. If Starbucks is getting its message across, it is not doing it through advertising. So it seems that a different phenomenon is at work here.

Starbucks is actually one of the purest examples of a brand that we have. It starts with a commodity product – coffee beans – and invests them with extraordinary added value by creating an experience that transcends the simple act of drinking an unnecessary beverage. And this experience becomes an integral part of the daily lives of millions of people. The experience varies from country to country but remains recognizably Starbucks: the brand shows a high degree of adaptability and a readiness to suit itself to changing ways of living. The wi-fi hotspots that enable customers to use wireless mobile computer technology in stores have made Starbucks a world leader in this area; it has understood the increasingly informal approach people take to doing business without fixed offices.

Through such developments, Starbucks has built its reputation and trust over many years. New product developments such as Frappuccino proved to Starbucks that it had earned that level of trust. From trust comes permission to experiment. That permission is extended as long as Starbucks remains true to its core ideals. Along the way Starbucks stretched the brand beyond its core of coffee, reaching into financial services, for example, with the launch in the US in 2003 of its Duetto card: part credit, part loyalty card. The loyalty element keeps the umbilical cord to the coffee experience and stops the card branching off into unrelated territory.

The question Starbucks is increasingly asking is: does the customer trust us enough for us to act as an editor in their lives? Clearly, coffee is an essential element in customers’ lifestyle, but what other aspects of their lives can we possibly serve? One of the interesting examples that is moving up Starbucks’ agenda is music. Starbucks has played music in its stores for 20 years, and there seems to be an association between relaxed coffee drinking and a background of music.

Timothy Jones was plucked out of the stores in the early 1990s to pursue his musical interests and create taped compilations of music for the stores. Year by year the operation got more serious and more professional. It started making compilations for different times in the day, and customer reactions showed that there was a strong affinity.

From ever-bigger ranges of music, the stores were given the technology to make their own selections to fit local tastes while keeping a close connection to the brand. Through its emotional resonance, music added another sensory layer to the store experience. Certain kinds of music – particularly chart hits – were seen as distant from the brand. Discovery or, in many cases, rediscovery of neglected artists, became an explicit aim.

In 1998, Starbucks went a step further and bought Hear Music, a retailer with six stores in California. David Brewster is now a key figure in this development. Hear Music does not just provide the music to play in stores; indeed, its role is becoming increasingly ambitious. It retains a small number of Hear Music outlets that sell CDs, and is opening a flagship store in Santa Monica, Los Angeles in spring 2004. The store will test whether there is a bigger opportunity to develop a new retailing concept that combines Hear Music and Starbucks.

Whatever the outcome of that venture, music remains integral to the Starbucks experience, not just for customers to listen to while drinking their coffee but to buy and take home as CDs. US Starbucks stores now have listening posts with headphones to try out the range of music. The CDs sold at Starbucks have a high editorial content in terms of both selection and recommendation, with 50-word descriptions provided for each track. There is also a series of artists’ choices: CDs with music chosen by, for example, Sheryl Crow, Ray Charles, and the Rolling Stones. The compilations are exclusive to Starbucks and offered through its stores. For a music industry in crisis, Starbucks offers something of a lifeline, selling CDs to customers who have been neglected by the music business’s obsession with the youth market and the threat of internet downloads. Building on its understanding of its customers’ lifestyle, Starbucks has realized that there is an opportunity to fill a gap while continuing to provide a service that remains focused on the in-store experience. Selling CDs is the “frosting on top.”

The network thus created is part of the Starbucks effect. A further community, or series of communities, is built around customers’ musical tastes: for 1940s jazz, world music, soul, blues, classical. The effect on the music business has been galvanizing, and the major labels cooperate with Starbucks to make their artists’ work available. This has both revived interest in neglected musicians and helped to introduce new singers: David Gray, for example, appeared on a Starbucks CD before he started selling in millions. Links with local radio stations then spread the ripples even further. Inevitably, this works best in Seattle, where KMTT – The Mountain station plays soft rock and “unplugged” sessions by touring artists. The resulting On the Mountain compilations are produced by Hear Music, with radio promotion sending listeners towards Starbucks stores and a proportion of sales being donated to the Wilderness Society.

I digressed into music because it provides evidence that Starbucks still has the ability to reinvent itself and take fresh risks. But we need to return to coffee because Starbucks always does, while keeping an entrepreneurial eye open for opportunities. It remains confident that there is still plenty of room for growth in the coffee market. “Oh, the places you’ll go” is the Dr Seuss–like spirit behind Starbucks. It still enjoys planting its flag in exotic parts of the world, and its spirit of adventure and romance remains strong. At the beginning of 2004, the next port of call is Paris, France. There is excitement about how the French, with their strong opinions about coffee and Americans, will take to Starbucks. But it needs to be restated that the Starbucks approach is not based on heavy advertising to take market share off competitors. It concentrates on growing the overall market. So while Starbucks has thrived, so too have coffee shops of many kinds, including that indomitable specialist, the owner–manager shop. Expect the same to happen in France.

Little of this market growth is achieved by hard selling. Put aside dramatizations of sales techniques you might have seen in such American plays and films as Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross and Barry Levinson’s Tin Men. These have mythologized the idea of the American hard sell. To get to that point there needs to be a strong base in reality: hard-sell techniques are used in the US to sign people up to everything from sex aids to religion. Yet Starbucks has never gone that route. You might get the odd offer (and strangely enough an offer does sometimes seem an odd thing to find in Starbucks), but the marketing spirit of the company is more akin to “Education, education, education” than “Sell, sell, sell.” So a lot of effort goes into training baristas to know their coffee as wine merchants know their wine. The mission to educate the customer in the ways of the bean persists, and is still in stark contrast to the dominant coffee brands that Starbucks came along to challenge. Maxwell House and Nescafé expect very little coffee knowledge of their customers. Indeed, there is a sense in which ignorance is bliss as far as these brands are concerned. Do Nescafé customers ever wonder where the coffee comes from? Few efforts are made to inform them.

Most coffee is sold in supermarkets, and for many years Starbucks refrained from competing in this arena, knowing that the brand experience is hopelessly diluted there – particularly because a pack in a supermarket does not talk to you. With Starbucks, the brand keeps coming back to its people. But there are passionate people in the roasting and packing departments too, and they knew that most of the company’s reluctance to enter supermarkets stemmed from the problem of maintaining quality. Coffee beans and ground coffee could sit on shelves for far too long, way past the short “use by” dates that Starbucks insists on. Taken in the last couple of years, the eventual decision to sell Starbucks coffee in US supermarkets was made possible by improvements in packaging technology brought about by Starbucks working closely with its suppliers and maintaining rigorous standards in its roasting plants.

So the product still remains at the center of the operation. Yet any product, any brand, is at the mercy of the subjective. “I don’t like it” is a valid reaction to any product. Personal taste counts. Starbucks is open to subjective dismissal by many people who do not particularly like coffee, or claim not to like Starbucks coffee. All I can observe is that millions of people worldwide do seem to like the coffee. And for those old enough to remember, it is interesting to recall the time before Starbucks and think about the quality of coffee available on the streets of our towns then. Starbucks has raised the overall standard, whatever your individual reaction to the Starbucks product.

Howard Schultz bought Starbucks because he loved the product but saw that it could become better as a social experience. For a brand to have growing power, it needs to be a social animal; it must have the ability to bring people together. The brand acts like a good party host, thinking of the needs and preferences of the guests and providing a suitable setting and atmosphere, yet allowing individuals to adapt the space to their own use.

So Starbucks, despite saying things like “Aim for the unexpected, the offbeat, the clever,” will never take idiosyncrasy too far. There has to remain a solidity that comes from a large dose of the expected, the familiar and the unchallenging. Though it may not want to admit it, that is part of its success. We go into Starbucks because we know. We might try other brands because we don’t know and they will allow us to risk a little, discover something, perhaps feel a little uneasy in doing so. In Starbucks, we discover only what it has provided the space for us to discover about ourselves; it does that by facilitation, not stimulation.

The reason for not admitting this is the fear of corporate uniformity. Starbucks wants to feel more offbeat than it really is. Yet in providing the literal and metaphorical comfy chair, it ensures that we keep coming back because we enjoy the experience of not being changed, of being at peace with ourselves. The brand is relaxed about being itself and about you being yourself. It does not send out imperatives to “Be like us or else.” It is an affirming brand rather than one that challenges you to become something else. It supports you, not transforms you, giving you confidence in your individuality, whether as customer or partner.

Starbucks naturally puts a lot of effort into trying to make this experience as congenial as possible. This means going beyond what many other brands regard as the tools of brand management: the guidelines governing the elements of the identity (logotype, colors, typefaces, and so on). The management of the Starbucks brand is built on the principle that everything matters. This stems from a system of beliefs and values that is intended to guide every action that anyone representing the company takes. If there is ever any doubt about a decision to be made, you resolve it by thinking about what the brand guides you towards.

Many in these sceptical, if not cynical, times may find it questionable to base their judgment on a set of beliefs that they did not come to themselves through a process of their own discovery. The strength of the Starbucks brand has been that it has persuaded a large number of people – particularly its own staff and its loyal customers – that its beliefs and values could actually be their own. But this is what happens in any business with a strong awareness of its brand: employees have a formal contract and an informal contract. The informal contract revolves around upholding the brand’s values in return for a greater degree of personal expression and involvement at work. For a brand to be effective, it needs to make emotional connections to employees and, through them, to customers – and to respect the physical and emotional needs of both groups. This raises both the expectations and the stakes, leaving brands vulnerable to relatively small slips. Trust built up over years can be lost in a moment. Starbucks has been able to ride out a lot of negative publicity because its foundations have been strong. But it has also been lucky because it has not told its positive story particularly well, not out of arrogance, but from a sense of bewildered hurt.

One lesson about brands is inescapable: there is no short cut to success. How many businesses launched in the dot-com boom survived to establish themselves as brands? Very few. How many believed they could offer themselves as brands overnight? Very many. Branding is not like instant coffee; you cannot take a spoonful to get a quick result. It takes time to build a brand because you have to give it strong foundations. The foundations start with a powerful, enduring idea that is embodied in the positive values of the brand. The idea gains resonance, depth and meaning through all the individual and collective actions taken over time. Wrong decisions and false steps can set a brand back, perhaps fatally.

Each individual has a role to play in helping to build the strength of the brand, because everyone affects the way it is perceived. Building a brand is not easy, but if you manage to do it, you create something that is incredibly valuable because people want to be associated with it – perhaps even to be defined by it. That brings a commercial value greater than any amount of marketing or advertising campaigns can create. Unknown 15 years ago, Starbucks is now ranked at number 70 in Interbrand’s table of the world’s most valuable brands. That is why Howard Schultz says: “The equity of the Starbucks brand is a priceless asset. Every decision we make has to contribute to its sustainability and differentiation.”

Above all, it is the barista who represents the Starbucks brand. The baristas, particularly in Seattle outside rush hours, are models of non-cloying friendliness. In the store on 1st and Marion when I visit in November 2003, the certificate on the wall says Yumi is partner of the quarter. You can tell why. Within a minute of walking in I receive a glowing smile and an espresso, and we exchange views on the Seattle Art Museum and London.

Particularly in America, but also throughout the world, there is a crisis of trust in the corporate world. The reasons are perfectly understandable. Corporate America has behaved badly, with scandals at Enron, Worldcom and the mutual funds adding to a widespread concern about the power of big business to act against the interests of the individual and the whole planet. The questions customers now ask of companies go way beyond their “value proposition”: the right product at the right price. This most basic transaction between brand and customer is soon disposed of. Customers want to know what a brand is going to give the world in return for the cash they hand over for a product. People’s faith in governments and institutions is dwindling, so consumers tend more and more to put their faith in brands. But faith – quite rightly – is not easily given, and people feel they have a right to some kind of say in the running of the brand.

This afflicts American brands particularly because much of the world is deeply suspicious of Brand USA in its current expression. American foreign policy fuels anti-Americanism, and naturally American brands suffer. Brand USA is powerful but vulnerable in many parts of the world, including those it might consider its best friends. But the more we get to know the brand through individual representatives and sub-brands, the less vulnerable it becomes. The brand reasserts its human values to win hearts and minds, rather than relying on its sheer might.

Visiting Seattle makes this a little clearer. The American brand has culturally resonant sub-brands, and Starbucks is a product of one of them. The Seattle sub-brand has been one of the great, but relatively unnoticed, phenomena of the last thirty years. In 1971, Jimi Hendrix, one of Seattle’s most famous sons and exiles, had just died, and Seattle’s biggest employer, Boeing, had cut half its staff. Since then, the region has given rise to Starbucks, Amazon and Nike. They represent a different America from Texas, New York or California; not necessarily a kinder, gentler America, but a more globally aware, customer-focused America, a less abrasive but even more optimistic one.

Starbucks is a brand that attempts to do practical good while providing a coffee experience that lightens people’s everyday lives. That is an unusual combination, but Starbucks has established a unique place for itself. Its focus on the quality of its coffee remains intense, and gives it the right, the freedom and the power to create communities around its stores. I can think of no other commercial brand that has such ability to be a good neighbor and to make other people good neighbors. The benevolent aspect of the brand is unusual: an antidote to the prevailing public cynicism on the one hand and corporate misbehavior on the other hand. If it can maintain its ability to encourage good works while providing a good cup of coffee, it could become one of the most powerful and hopeful beacons in the world.