Each tribal truth is followed by a number of Leading Questions to prompt you to think about your company and your business practices in different ways. And a short section at the end of the book, From Ideas to Implementation, suggests a number of action steps you can take to improve your business practices now.
But Tribal Knowledge is also more than just a book—it’s the beginning of a conversation between you, me, and others. I say this because we have the opportunity to share comments, opinions, and rebuttals on everything written in this book by visiting the Tribal Knowledge blog at www.tribalknowledge.biz.
Each tribal truth from the book has its own blog posting, and I encourage you to share your thoughts, whether you noddingly agree or vehemently disagree with the lessons I have shared. I’d love to hear (and others would, too) about how you are using the lessons this book shares to make things happen in your work life.
If you are unfamiliar with what a blog is and clueless as to how to participate in a blog, then this is the perfect time to learn.
In the following pages of Tribal Knowledge, you’ll gain access to the many business and marketing lessons that helped Starbucks transform the cultural landscape and create an industry from someone who lived inside the Starbucks tribe.
The time has come for people outside the tribe to have access to insider knowledge that helped build the Starbucks business and the Starbucks brand.
Managing a brand is a lifetime of work. Brands are fragile. You have to recognize the success of Starbucks, or any company or brand, is not an entitlement. It has to be earned every day.
HOWARD SCHULTZ,
Starbucks chairman and visionary
(“Mr. Coffee,” Context, August/September 2001, p. 22)
Contrary to what you may have heard or thought, Starbucks never sought to create a brand. Instead, the company passionately sought to create appreciation for a better tasting cup of coffee.
It was, in fact, as basic as that.
The unconscious process of forming its brand came out of unrelenting passion, not unending spin. Starbucks was too busy sourcing and roasting the highest-quality coffee beans to think about branding. Starbucks was too busy educating customers on how and why they should appreciate a stronger, bolder cup, more flavorful cup of coffee to think about branding. Starbucks was too busy creating a comforting and welcoming place for people to exhale than to think about branding.
Starbucks’ mission was to change the way people drank and appreciated coffee, and it did this by educating customers about its product with enthusiasm. When the company began, coffee was viewed only as a hot, brown liquid that was consumed out of habit and a need for caffeine. Starbucks knew that the coffee experience could be—and should be—much more than that. When done right, the subtle, rich, exotic flavors of coffee, served in a cozy, relaxing environment could lead to the kind of “rewarding everyday moments” that were missing from the American retail landscape. And so it grew its business by creating knowledgeable customers. It still grows in the same way today—the practices that worked then, work now.
Starbucks positioned its employees (the company calls them partners) as the coffee experts because they were. Its baristas learned the craft of serving up a stronger, bolder cup of coffee while chatting with customers, giving the people who came into its stores the opportunity to learn, relax, and enjoy the experience of delicious coffee. And where did the conversation focus? On the beans. Starbucks employees knew backward and forward the story of the coffees they served and easily could rattle off nuances about the roasting process, taste differences between its varietals, blends, and single-origin coffees, and the mystique surrounding the history of the beverages they handcrafted from behind the espresso machine.
It was crucial that Starbucks baristas knew their coffee because Howard Schultz knew that it is all too easy to taint the perfect coffee experience. Even if you select the right beans and roast them to perfection, you can still mess it up in a variety of ways. Coffee beans will retain their peak flavor for only so long (which is why Starbucks donates out-of-date coffee to charity); the grind must be coarser or finer, depending upon the brew (drip coffee versus straight espresso, for example); the ratio of ground coffee to water must be precise; the water must be filtered and pure; the brewing time must be exact (especially for espresso shots); and the brewed coffee must be fresh. With all of this, it’s not difficult to see why Starbucks focused more on its coffee and less on its branding.
Beyond the coffee itself, Starbucks paid attention to the in-store experience. Store signage at the time looked like travel posters, appealing to customers’ adventuresome nature to help explain the origins of the coffees it served. The store itself was clean and uncluttered, keeping the focus on the product and making the atmosphere calm and beckoning.
It was all about the coffee and the experience, never the brand.
But because Starbucks was busy working on and working in the business, it built a business of which the by-product was the creation of a strong brand.
Starbucks teaches us that rarely, if ever, can you sprinkle magical branding dust to create an endearing and enduring brand from scratch. But that doesn’t stop companies from trying. Instead of spending money to improve the performance of a product or enhance the customer’s experience, many companies will attempt to build a brand by throwing money into multimillion-dollar image campaigns. The focus moves away from product devotion to the appearance of product devotion.
A business cannot sustain itself on image, no matter how much money is dumped into sporadic, heavy-up advertising campaigns. Companies that put their money behind their brand and not their business fail to realize that the business is the brand.
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