The Brand Call!

We feature this brand a lot.

It’s a stellar example of an experience brand. Coffee is only a prop used to deliver that “third place” experience.

It’s the kitchen table that Boomers remember where family and friends would gather and chat. A place to hang at mornings and at night. Where relationships rekindle and restore.

With dual income families, the 24/7 time demand, fast food and surrogate technology, it’s a high-touch experience that doesn’t exist in many homes anymore.

Starbucks is a brand that has found itself at the peak of one marketing “S-Curve” moving to another.

Change is not only eminent, it’s mandatory.

In 1987, Howard Schultz took over Starbucks. It’s where he worked as director of retailing and marketing. In 20 years, he moved it from a handful of cafes to an international behemoth with 15,000 locations worldwide.

But it’s been a lousy year for Starbucks.

For the first time ever, the number of store transactions were down in fourth quarter 2007 and the share price took a pounding, dropping 50% in value during the past year.

This past week, Schultz reclaimed the CEO slot with a promise to take Starbucks “back to its roots.”

As brands expand and grow, the emotional drive of the entrepreneur often gets lost in the left-brain thinking set of the MBA executive growth teams.

These MBA execs are often the ones that take the emotional experience brand deliverable and boil it down to its mechanical operation and rational benefit payouts. They put in programs to streamline and mass duplicate. They translate the unique experience into a competitive category context.

It wasn’t long before the Starbucks brand was forced into the same box as fast food. Starbucks management has been lifting strategy from McDonald’s with the addition of drive-thru windows and even hot breakfast sandwiches.

McDonald’s announcement that it would start incorporating coffee bars and “baristas” in 14,000 US locations may have been the proverbial straw that fueled Schultz to reclaim the brand experience.

The MBAs claim two types of brands – product brands and service brands.

Here at BrandVenture, we believe that successful brands capture that “third place” category of “experience” brands.

We also have long chucked the business textbook “USP” – the Unique Selling Proposition… and replaced it with the “EIP” – The Emotional Ignition Point of the brand experience.

“Integrated Marketing Communications” is also a term that is banned from any use at BrandVenture.

All the ad agencies claim expertise in it. That’s fine with us.

This year, we rally around what we term as the “Sustainable Brand Experience.” It’s what needs…no, let me reword this… it’s what must be delivered by brands…protected and preserved.

The time around that kitchen table is a Sustainable Brand Experience that McDonald’s cannot duplicate.

Schultz hears the calling.

I hope others like Schultz hear it too!