And to realize the full potential of the brand, one must work on and work in the business every day of every year.
You cannot create a brand before you create a business—the process is simultaneous. As you build your business, you create your brand.
Leading Questions …
Does your business define itself by its product or service or by its image?
How does your business overtly show its passion—its focus—to customers?
How must your business change to become more business-minded and less brand-focused?
Brands must do more than provide good products. Today, services and products are the ante. It is how they are positioned and how consumers are engaged that separates the winners from the losers.
SCOTT BEDBURY,
former Starbucks marketing executive
(internal Starbucks presentation, Seattle)
Starbucks has become one of the most respected, admired, and financially successful global businesses in the world without spending a hill of (coffee) beans on advertising. That’s amazing when you compare it to companies such as Coca-Cola, Microsoft, and McDonald’s, who’ve spent billions of dollars on traditional advertising campaigns to become global brands.
Yet Starbucks hasn’t skimped on marketing itself. Every time it’s open for business, its marketing machine is in full effect. It’s just that Starbucks has a different view of marketing. As David Packard, cofounder of Hewlett-Packard, once said, “Marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department.” Marketing, though a distinct department within the company, is still a part of everyone’s job, a part of everything the company does. Starbucks has “baked” marketing into its business by weaving passion for its product into everything it does.
This strategy was intentional from the start, mostly, though, due to the prohibitive cost of advertising. When Starbucks began, it didn’t have the cash to advertise because it was putting all the money it had into improving its products and opening more stores. Without the backing of traditional advertising, it had to get creative. And so its in-store experience became Starbucks’ primary marketing tool.
Everything about the Starbucks experience marketed the Starbucks business: the coffee in the iconic white logo cup; the personal interaction between a customer and a Starbucks barista; the plush chairs, the in-store color scheme (all themed to reflect the four stages of the roasting story: growth/greens, roast/browns and reds, brew/ blues, and aroma/pastels); the music playing overhead; the welcoming smell of the coffee; and the feeling customers had during their Starbucks “moment.”
And it worked.
The marketing of the store and the brand has little to do with traditional advertising and everything to do with perfecting the details. Starbucks learned that being conscientious about the little things—and all the little things, from how a customer orders a beverage to the cleanliness of its restrooms to the way caramel is drizzled atop a latte—spreads more positive publicity than any television commercial could. And when it came to the product, that’s where the company excelled.
Starbucks grew in popularity and expanded geographically based on its willingness to share. They did so by sampling generously: offering its customers the opportunity to taste different coffees on the house. When Starbucks provides samples, it does more so to share than to sell. Yes, it’s sharing free coffee, but, more to the point, Starbucks is sharing its passion for dark-roasted coffee and its pride in how the beverage tastes and the craftsmanship that goes into making it. The end result is that its customers receive the entire Starbucks experience firsthand, not through catchy jingles or humorous commercials.
That said, the company did test spending marketing dollars on television commercials in the spring of 1998 to support the increasing popularity of its Frappuccino® blended coffee beverages. Starbucks ended up quickly pulling the campaign, however, because it couldn’t immediately measure the impact. But when Starbucks sampled beverages in its stores, baristas could immediately measure sampling’s impact by watching the faces (and subsequent smiles) of customers while they tasted the coffee. With the belief that tasting was believing and that the personal touch meant everything, Starbucks cut the TV ads and kept sampling, tapping into its existing customer base to grow sales.
Because word-of-mouth publicity is so integral to the company’s success, Starbucks’ homespun approaches to marketing go well beyond the immediate in-store experiences customers have. For instance, each Starbucks location is paired with a nearby charity, to which it donates day-old pastries and for which it works to raise awareness and money. And, at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, Starbucks acts as a pseudo-sponsor, having set up espresso carts behind the scenes for years. The company doesn’t draw much attention to itself by doing these things, but it does know that attention and recognition will come.
In recent years, Starbucks has dedicated some resources to traditional advertising, such as promoting new beverages on billboards and through radio spots, though the efforts are targeted to specific cities, not a national audience. When Starbucks does advertise, it keeps its efforts local and personal, giving everything it has to marketing its business through running its business.
Starbucks learned the most effective way to spend its marketing dollars is not on making funnier television commercials but rather on making better customer experiences. Counterintuitive, yes. But highly successful nonetheless.
Leading Questions …
How does your company’s advertising contribute to its sales growth? its mission?
What role does word-of-mouth publicity play within your company?
What must change at your company in order for it to spend its marketing dollars not on making the advertising better but on making the customer experience better?
Who wants to sell a common, ordinary, everyday, me-too product? More important, who wants to buy one?
The marketplace is chock-full with all-too-similar goods and services in every category imaginable. How many people will actually go out of their way to buy what you’re selling if what you’re selling is nearly identical to everything else on the market? That’s why lasting brand loyalty is built on making the common uncommon—because while a price advantage, or more convenient locations, or whiz-bang product features may vanish tomorrow, uncommon quality attracts and connects with your customers in a powerfully personal and permanent way.
In Guy Kawasaki’s classic book on management, The Macintosh Way, he expounds on “doing the right things right,” part of which is creating the right products. “The right products,” he writes, “reward their owners; they are deep, indulgent, complete, and elegant.” The products provide everything the customers expect from them, and they satisfy wants, not needs. Indulgent, elegant—do these words describe a no-frills transaction? Nope.
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