Now that Starbucks' CMO has asked its agencies to "provide ideas to move the brand forward," four-year incumbent lead agency Wieden & Kennedy has opted out of the process.
It was a selfless act of kindness. Starbucks should hope that all of its agencies walk out the door, which should then be locked after the last one leaves.
I mean no slight to any of the agencies..but we see this kabuki drama all the time (i.e. it's deja vu, all over again):
- A business in distress demands that one or more marketing firms fall on their swords
- Then come the calls for new ideas, agencies and, sometimes, new internal staff
- The people getting asked for this burst of otherwise latent brilliance are the same folks who just went through similar firedrills with other businesses in distress, so
- Agencies and employees swap jobs, and the timer gets reset to count the months until the next firedrill
Thus the revolving door of marketing people and ideas gets spun when sales are sliding. The CEO dares the CMO to fix things...or risk getting let go, and finding another situation in which he or she will get the same challenge. Names and concepts change, but they're all oddly similar. And equally doomed to fail.
The problem is that the CMO is the wrong person to ask to fix a brand problem. So are the ad agencies. Starbucks' challenge isn't its branding or communications, but rather the reality of its stores, its offering, and the context in which it and its would-be customers live.
The company sells coffee at a premium to home-prepared versions and the gunk available at competing fast-food outlets. To warrant the premium, it has to offer real differences:
- How people are served
- What they get
- The experience of when they consume it
The idea of a coffeehouse is historically rich, and people in America need public places to congregate (we don't have pubs like the English, for instance). Substantiating that benefit for a premium on price is harder when a recession makes every dollar harder to spend.
But the answer to this problem isn't a call to brand gurus to invent imaginary reasons or more creative blather. The litmus test is just too rooted in reality (and, dare I say, obvious) to avoid:
Why would a consumer pay more for the privilege of drinking coffee at Starbucks?
No branding expert, no matter how inspired by the gods of manipulation, can come up with that answer. It has nothing to do with marketing, per se.
Founder and now-returned CEO Howard Schultz has it right when he challenges the operation to focus on serving great coffee. But the company is still struggling to make that focus, or...gasp...brand promise, relevant to consumers, and realized in the reality of the Starbucks business model.
But it's in this messy reality that the key to Starbucks' salvation will be found.
So I would hope it isn't just asking its marketing agencies to rethink the brand. I'd put the same question to every operational department, perhaps even before I'd ask the CMO for input.
The Starbucks brand, like that of any company, is not a thing or an idea that needs to get communicated to the public; rather, it's a set of ever-evolving, real-time behaviors that earn and deliver relevance and value in consumers lives.
Branding expresses these qualities, and is not a substitute for them. I wonder what would happen if Starbucks looked at its brand marketing as a tactic, not its strategy? It might help it fix its reality first and, from that, everything else could follow (including the "ideas to move the brand forward" from the next cadre of marketing experts allowed to answer the question).
Otherwise, aren't they just talking about useless spinning in a revolving door?
Link to original post