Starbucks thinks you forgot that coffee exists (but you probably didn't)

And I offer a re-write of a joke from last week

Hello Gobbledeers,

How’s it going? I know how it’s going over here - next week is one of the best weeks of the year. Why? Because we’ll be publishing a Gobbledy Classic, just like a new Gobbledy column, except it’s old. You’ll love it, I promise*.

(*not legally binding).

Today - a bunch of words about how much I hate Starbucks’ new commercial, but in a mostly constructive way.

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A Correction…or An Improvement…or I Make Something Worse

First, I need to apologize to my readers. I believe that you Gobbledeers (tm) read this newsletter each week to get an optimal mix of marketing-related ideas and stupid jokes mixed in.

I try (each and every week! mostly! most weeks! a slight majority of weeks!) to make the jokes good. Or passable. I try to write passable jokes mixed in with marketing stuff.

To wit - last week (and, apparently, this week) I included this image taken from the Charmin website of the Charmin Bear reading BEAR Magazine:

And I noted that when his wife isn’t home he reads “Bare” magazine.

And literally right after I hit send on the newsletter I thought to myself, “Goddammit, the correct joke was that he reads Bear-ly Legal Magazine when his wife isn’t home.” Or I guess, maybe he’s an attorney and reads Bear-ly Legal Magazine, which is, of course, a law review journal. For bears.

In any case, I’m really sorry I let you down. I promise all jokes this week will be the best that I can think of (at that moment). Assuming you (or anyone) thinks “Bear-ly Legal Magazine” is the best joke at any time.

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One word: coffee. One problem: where do you get it?

I thought we’d do a little marketing thought experiment. Or, if you’d prefer for some reason, imagine I’m a marketing professor and you’re a student (which sounds like it’s possibly a scenario from Bear-ly Legal Magazine, though I assure you it is not) and you’re taking a marketing class* and this is a group assignment. Also, group assignments are the worst, I’m sorry.

(*I think I’d enjoy teaching marketing. If any of you have done this, I’d be interested in hearing about how you felt about it.)

So here’s the assignment:

You are hired to run marketing at a struggling beverage company. What marketing can you create to help to turn around its fortunes?

A little background before you begin:

The company has been around for decades and has been wildly successful, nearly single-handedly building out the “premium retail” segment for its category. It became successful because it focused relentlessly on customer experience, expanding retail locations globally while creating an in-store experience that it famously referred to as a “third place,” somewhere outside of home and office where people would actually want to spend time.

It undertook this massive expansion at the same time that it created the most expansive personalization effort in the history of retail, allowing you to order your beverage however you’d like, and when the drink was ready, the person making it called out your name (sometimes even pronouncing and spelling it correctly), creating a moment of connection.

Then, slowly, it chipped away at that customer experience, failing to recognize the importance (and differentiation) of that small moment of personal connection where the person making your beverage calls out your name and you say “thank you” and you sit in the store and work or chat or whatever. They thought of themselves as a beverage company, rather than as a company that creates experiences - at scale - where people can feel comfortable and known.

They start allowing non-brand locations to promote that they’re selling your brand’s coffee - like at a kiosk in a hotel. So you can get the product, but you can’t get the experience.

They add drive-thrus, skipping the personalized store experience.

They introduce an incredibly successful app, which allows people to skip the experience entirely and just get the beverage.

They remove seats from the stores, to make more room for people to run in and pick up the beverage they ordered on the app, removing the ability to sit and enjoy the experience the company has curated.

Slowly, slowly, slowly they’ve removed what was unique-to-your-company about the experience, and all that remained was a place where you picked up drinks you ordered on an app.

Obviously, this is Starbucks.

Earlier this year, Howard Shultz, their founder, somewhat famously wrote an open letter on LinkedIn (?) addressed to the board of the company that spoke to the underlying challenge the company had created for itself:

For the company to appropriately respond to the pressures of a very difficult operating environment… “the center” must hold. What’s “the center,” you ask? The soul of the company, and the soul of the brand is “the center.” It must be nurtured, protected, and preserved.

Indeed.

So, that’s what you’ve inherited in this assignment. Your company lost its soul. It still sold your product to millions of people, but it misunderstood WHY people loved your brand. The company slowly - over time - made decision after decision based on the idea that people loved the drinks, when in fact, people loved the brand.

What marketing can you create to remind people of the connection they used to have when they went to get a coffee at Starbucks?

I’ll give you 11 seconds to work on the assignment.

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While you’re working on that - I need to give credit where its due to my former co-worker Rudy, with whom I worked 20 years ago. Rudy said 3 things about marketing when I worked with him that I still think about, 2 of which were unbelievably prescient…

1. In 2001 he told me that text-based search ads will take over the internet and be the most effective form of advertising. I’m not sure how I can emphasize what an insane idea that was at the time.

2. He was on the phone with someone from Coca Cola, and they were asking how to measure the efficacy of their billboards in Chicago, because they were getting grief about spending marketing dollars on marketing stuff that they couldn’t measure (this was in 2002!). He said, “well, take down the billboards and see how it affects sales.” And the person on the phone said, “oh, we can’t do that.” And Rudy responded, “well then, you have your answer.” Sometimes we get too caught up on the measurement piece when we know the right thing to do from a marketing perspective.

3. He came back from a work trip where there was a kiosk in the lobby of his hotel that had a sign saying it sold Starbucks coffee, and he said to me, “their decision to allow that will destroy the company. You should only be able to buy Starbucks in a Starbucks.”

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OK, pencils down.

Let’s share what you came up with.

“Oh yes, with the hand up. You go first - what’s your name?”

“Hi - I’m Bill, I’m with Starbucks’ ad agency. We thought the best idea would be to create an ad that really focuses on two areas. First, the ad should remind people that coffee exists. That’s very important. We always think about that great scene in 30 Rock where Dennis, the lead character (Liz’)s total loser of a boyfriend, talks about the new coffee vending machine he bought, and he has this great exchange with Liz about it:

Dennis: “One word: coffee. One problem: where do you get it?”

Liz: “Anywhere! You get it anywhere!”

Dennis: “Wrong! You get it at my coffee vending machine. 38th & 6th in the basement of the K-Mart. You just go downstairs, you get the key from David and BOOM!”

“People never remember that coffee exists! That’s the problem Starbucks is having! We wanted to create a commercial that reminds people that coffee is a thing people drink. Super important. And then, we wanted to make sure that the sound effects in the commercial - specifically, a woman slurping on a cup of coffee - are so off-putting that people will beg us to stop running the ad.”

Also, finally, and it’s a small thing, we want to make sure that the coffee in the ad is served in a clear mug, something we don’t offer in the stores. We thought that would be helpful.”

OK great, let’s see the ad!

“And then we came up with a tagline that’ll help people remember Starbucks: “It’s a great day for coffee!”

“How’d we do?”

Ugh.

Starbucks has undergone massive changes - 2 CEOs in the past 2 years - to try to re-build the brand to focus on the feeling you get when you’re in a Starbucks. The welcoming, personal feeling of being there. So I’m so glad to see in the ad that you addressed absolutely none of that. And instead went with, “you should drink coffee.”

This approach would work if there was terrible press about coffee where we discovered that drinking too much coffee was making people sick and people had to limit it. And you wanted to remind people that drinking it on occasion was OK. Like a beer ad - maybe along the lines of the old Lowenbrau “Here’s to good friends, tonight is kinda special” campaign:

But that’s not what you did. You, instead, came up with a reminder that the category exists and is enjoyable, but - and here’s the problem - as Liz Lemon said in 30 Rock, “YOU GET IT ANYWHERE.”

This is a silly thing to get worked up about. And I’m going to be frank with you - my main problem with this ad is the sound of the coffee being made and the slurping. The goddamned slurping. It is off-putting (ASMRrrrrrrrghhhhh). But maybe it’s just off-putting to me? I don’t know. But also that it fails to recognize the opportunity it has to remind people of why they loved Starbucks in the first place - the personal connection they felt with the barista in the store.

How important is a personal moment like that? Well, here’s a little tidbit from United Airlines. As Covid was waning, somebody on the exec team said to Scott Kirby, the CEO of United, that they should stop having the flight attendants hand out little wipes when customers board, and they’d be able to save a couple of million dollars.

If you’ve flown United recently you may note that they still hand out the wipes. Kirby said that he liked that handing out wipes forced the flight attendants to make eye contact and individually greet every passenger on the plane. In an industry where, famously, former American Airlines’ CEO Robert Crandall once ordered catering to remove one olive from first class salads to save $40,000, spending a couple of millions of dollars a year so flight attendants can make eye contact shows that some brands believe personal connection with customers is incredibly valuable.

Finally, if you want to see what a marketing campaign based around customer experience looks like, Chick-Fil-A did a bang-up job with their “Its the Little Things” campaign:

Or if you really want to know the power of coffee, please know that Intel laid off 15,000 people but, to make the remaining team feel better, said they were reinstating free coffee in the office:

“Although Intel still faces cost challenges, we understand that small comforts play a significant role in our daily routines…We know this is a small step, but we hope it is a meaningful one in supporting our workplace culture.”

It’s a great day for coffee!

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As always, thanks for reading to the end. As I mention each week, I get so much out of chatting with readers about marketing stuff. If you’d like to spend 25 minutes talking about marketing or coffee, or ads you like, here’s my Calendly link. And for those of you new here, I help marketers create better messaging - shoot me an email at jared@sagelett.com or schedule time through that link so we can talk about how our 2-day workshop will transform how you talk about your company.