Branding is a funny thing.
Just the other day, strolling back to my apartment (indeed, from a nearby Starbucks), I noticed an article in BusinessWeek questioning CEO Howard Schultz's success in using Starbucks' retro logo to re-brand Starbucks as, well, itself -- that is, less corporate behemoth and more cozy cafe.
(If you haven't yet seen it, and you're not a frequent tall-soy-no whip-half caf-extra hot-skim latte drinker, it's a much more rustic, coffee bean-colored version of their familiar, sanitized green siren.)
The new logo is a tough sell for most of the company's current customers. Much of the world isn't even familiar with the company as anything less than a one-stop, five-buck McLatte shop. Yet for those familiar with the company's beginnings -- remember when that Starbucks first came around? How captivated you were by the low lights, the "grande" and "venti" sizes, the whir of the automatic espresso machine? -- Starbucks has long been lost in its own grandeur, like the prodigal son with too much caffeine in his blood to bother looking back.
Just when Starbucks achieved success in shareholder terms, they lost it in clutter, or quality, or overreach. Then Starbucks' success became its own beast, and the values that the company invested so much in to attach to that little green disc logo became diluted, like a cup of...Dunkin Donuts coffee. (Or so they'd like you to think.)
But now they're back, with re-trained baristas and free refills and personalization and smiles and -- yes, even new brew.
For all the hooplah, the new Pike Place roast for drip coffee still tasted over-roasted to me. But as I ordered a straightforward, safe "grande vanilla latte" from a Starbucks that isn't typically mobbed like the rabbit hole-sized one on the northwest corner of Bryant Park, I thought to myself: yes. This is what I want. To sit down with my laptop and my warm espresso beverage and relax to safe, alterna-jazz humming in the distance.
This is precisely the mental association Starbucks is banking you'll make.
But the company only plans on using those brown cups for eight weeks. After that, the honeymoon is over -- and the company's hoping that you'll forgive them all over again for returning chilly feel of corporate anonymity and the breakfast sandwiches that look as though they belong attached to the sidewall of fresh Goodyear rubber.
Starbucks would probably argue that the logo is a separate beast from the personal attention they now profess to practice, and that a return to the green logo doesn't mean they still can't be vintage Starbucks in practice. And I agree, in theory. But they've created a new brand. In the minds of consumers, vintage brown is (hopefully) bonded to service, and bright green is attached to convenience. The company is switching back to the green in an attempt to slightly alter the green logo's associations. But I'm not sure that eight weeks can turn around decades of associations with that little green logo.
Which is why I think we need more brown cups.
Eight weeks of vintage Starbucks just isn't enough for the company. Somehow, those muddied, fusty old logos escape the shadow of the company's monolithic corporate reputation. In my experience, it was like a different coffee shop altogether -- note I said "coffee shop," and not chain -- and while some critics say that's bad news, I'd argue that it's good. Schultz knows the value in that old logo, which is why he has (and should continue to) trot it out from time to time. The problem, of course, is how to reconcile that with the green one.
In other words, how to reconcile two different brands that attract two different consumers: Green logo people like drive-thru caramel macchiatos in multiples. Brown logo people prefer free WiFi and their name scrawled on their cup of freshly-ground Ethiopia Sidamo. Go figure.
It seems that Starbucks wants to bring everyone back to the green side -- but I think they should welcome their brand dichotomy and capitalize on it. At first, I would say they should keep the brown cups for certain drinks -- say, drip coffee only, since new focus has been placed on it. But that seems too divisive. Perhaps the company could open up "brown" locations -- that is, those that attract its educated, average age of 42 and average income of $90,000 "core customers." The green locations would function for the masses around that group. Again, this seems too divisive.
The only solution I can come up with is that Starbucks uses its vintage, brown logos on a regular basis -- say, the first week of every month. I'd say call it "customer week," but that would infer that the rest of the month isn't. Somehow, they've got to get more cups in circulation. The brown logo is a branding success. They should continue to wonder: "What can brown do for you?"
There's an incredible social power that Starbucks cups hold -- after all, what is Christmas without red cups? With that in mind, perhaps Starbucks can reinforce its attempts to reconnect with its customers using the brown logo -- and avoid the haphazard, "we're in trouble, so we've got to bring out the brown cups and tell the media" thing they've got going right now.
I would argue that most people don't care if Starbucks baristas were re-trained one day. Or that they're making changes at all. All customers really care about, believe it or not, is seeing that in action when they stop by for a cup of joe. They don't want to hear the announcements -- they want to see them. Thanks to the company's efforts, the brown cups have become the embodiment of change.
In the end, what I do know is this: in the separate worlds of brand management and "coffeenerdness," as Sports Illustrated's resident caffeine expert Peter King has coined, the brown logo is making positive waves. Don't ruin a good thing.