Star-schmaltz

My father introduced me to Starbucks.  It was the late nineties and, for some years, he’d been flying back and forth to the States with work.  One weekend we were walking through the rather synthetic surroundings of Milton Keynes’ shopping centre when he spotted a new store not far from John Lewis.  I was 15, I didn’t drink coffee, it was noisy, it was cluttered, I didn’t understand the menu and I couldn’t fathom his excitement. 

Some years later I drink coffee by the bucket and am proud to work with one of the world’s finest producers and suppliers of quality coffee, Lavazza.  Starbucks, however, is a very different proposition and, many years after my first encounter with the brand, I get it.

Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life without Losing Its Soul, written by the company’s former CEO, Howard Schultz, is a very personal account of how the company lost its way – and then found it. 

Schultz, although very likeable, is almost as obsessive in his storytelling as he is about the company he built.  Referring to the impact that serving toasted cheese sandwiches at breakfast had on the in-store experience as ‘that smell’, he returns to the issue repeatedly.  And company-wide memos, for which Schultz is famed, form an important backbone in terms of his narrative.  But one anecdote stood out.

I was interested to read how Starbucks used the 2008 presidential election to engage with its American audience.  Breaking from tradition, Starbucks ran a TV advert:

What if we cared as much on Nov. 5^th

As we care on Nov. 4^th?

What if we cared all of the time

The way we care some of the time?

What if we cared when it was inconvenient

As much as we care when it’s convenient?

Would your community be a better place?

Would our country be a better place?

Would our world be a better place?

We think so, too.

If you care enough to vote,

We care enough to give you

A free cup of coffee.

Come into Starbucks on Nov. 4^th

Tell us you voted,

And we’ll proudly give you

A tall cup of brewed coffee on us.

You & Starbucks.

It’s bigger than coffee.

Starbucks ran the ad just once during Saturday Night Live.  It drove traffic in store, it went viral, the YouTube video got nearly half a million hits, 405,000 people engaged with the brand on Facebook and US stores served two and a half times more coffee than normal – two million cups.  Yes we Brits recoil at this type of schmaltz but you can’t deny that metrics like these are every PR’s dream. 

Although a heavy handed PR tool, which at times made me wince, Onward is a fascinating and captivating read and I was interested to find that colleagues who disliked the brand before, were more inclined to appreciate it having read the book.  I’d recommend Onward to coffee lovers, haters and everyone in between.  But don’t buy it in Starbucks – it’s cheaper on Amazon.