The BV Blog

The apocalypse is upon us.

Starbucks, high and mighty coffee giant, and television advertising naysayer, has finally launched a national television advertising campaign.

The new ads, created by the team at Weiden & Kennedy are lovely. The colors and animation immediately evoke a feeling of holiday verisimilitude. And human interaction with animals always gives me the warm and fuzzies.

Bear Hug

Window Washer

Ski Lift

The Los Angeles Times quoted Starbucks Chief Operating Officer Martin Coles as saying “The ad campaign is designed to ‘capitalize on our brand awareness while driving new customers and existing customers to our stores.’”

I’m not sure these ads are going to do the trick. I’ve been a Starbucks devotee for years, and cannot, with great conviction, say that these ads are appropriate to their brand or their customer.

Where are the leather arm chairs and rich green colors? Where are the smiling faces of their baristas, around which their entire brand identity revolves? Where’s the guy in the corner who bought one cup of coffee at 9 am and is still working on his novel at 5:30 pm?

Starbucks is for tech-heads, snobby city-folk, laptop junkies and people with i-Pod earphones surgically implanted in their heads. Not for outdoorsy, woodland creature and winter wonderland-loving granola heads.

This is the Starbucks we know and love. The critical problem with this campaign is that it does nothing to reinforce the Starbucks brand. There’s nothing to solidify that in-store experience that keeps customers coming back again and again.

That said, what this campaign has accomplished is to get people talking about who Starbucks really is, and who they certainly are not.

Don’t make the same mistakes Starbucks has made. Your marketing efforts should make an authentic connection with your customers and reinforce the experiences they have with your company. The key is to focus on your customers, who they are and what they view your business to be.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a fine thing to re-brand or re-position yourself in the marketplace, but if you lose sight of who you are in the process, people will wonder if you knew who you were in the first place.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 12th, 2007 at 11:03 am and is filed under Marketing Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.