2013/11/28

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Learning About America from Starbucks

www.everythingbutthecoffee.net

The Rough Democracy of Buying: Some Opening Proposition

What we buy has meaning. We aren’t just dupes.

The meaning of buying expands as other institutions recede.

My Failed Research Project What the Rise and Fall of Starbucks, 1995-2007, and what this tells us

about America and Americans

Alice Cooper said

in 2008, “It used to be said that as GM goes, so goes America. Now it

is as Starbucks goes, so goes America.”

The First Starbucks and the Beginning of Success

A Starbucks will open on your block

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Starbucks is Everywhere: Brand Success

Starbucks is Everywhere: Brand Success

Starbucks is Everywhere: Brand Success

Starbucks is Everywhere: Brand Success

Starbucks is Everywhere: Brand Success

Starbucks is Everywhere: Brand Success

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Starbucks is Everywhere: Brand Success

Starbucks in Tokyo

Why Do People Pay So Much for Something Ordinary, or What is the

“Value” of Starbucks?

The Wait Why Pay the Premium?

Why We Pay Extra – Starbucks responds to desires

-- Functional

-- Emotion

--Aspirational, Create a Self Image, Make Distinctions

-- One last note, mass brands have more than one reason for their success.

Functional Consumption: Why Pay the Premium?

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Functional Transaction: Office Outsourcing and Renting Space

Functional Transaction: Renting Space/Bathrooms

Emotional Buying: Predictability

Predictable Spaces – Predictable People

Fear (emotion), Cocooning, and the Retreat to the Private in the US Emotional Buying

The Decline of Community -- We Don’t Like It:

In the opening line of the Academy Award winning film, Crash, Graham says, “It’s the

sense of touch. In any real city, you walk, you know? You brush past people, people bump into you. But in Los Angeles, nobody touches you. We’re always behind metal and glass. I

think we miss the touch so much, we crash into each, just so we can fell something.”

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The Decline of Community

Bowling Alone and the long winter of suburbanized hibernation.

Adds cultural critic James Twitchell, “we will do anything to get affiliation.”

The Emotional Desire for Community: Learning to Speak Starbucks

“I’ll have a half-caf venti vanilla latte extra hot with three pumps of

strawberry.”

How Starbucks Creates – Manufactures - Belonging

From the employee handbook on “legendary service”: A worker hands a customer a drink and says, “Tall

mocha, thank you.” “Basic or legendary?” the manual asks baristas in

training. “Basic,” is the answer, “because it what the customer

expects. It is a polite response, but there is no personal connection.”

To upgrade the service, the manual recommends that workers say something along these lines, “Thanks, John, enjoy your mocha!” By putting it this way, the manual explains, “The partner recognized the customer by name. There was a personal connection.”

Emotional Buying Self Gifting

Not really about coffee – Class standing, aspirational buying, and the Anti-McDonald’s

Not going to McDonald’s says, You care about quality, not value.

You want something special, not ordinary.

You are the kind of person that appreciates finer things tastes.

Aspirational Buying -- Affordable Class Making

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Aspirational Buying: Affordable Status Making

‘Why do you go to Starbucks?”

“Because successful people go there and I think maybe it will rub off on me.”

Another said, “Makes you look like you have money.”

Aspirational Buying Showing Your Care and The Current

State of Politics

Broad distrust of political institutions. Yet the continued desire for change. Enter the corporation.

The desire for change, but the unwillingness to engage in sustained activism. Enter the corporation.

Wanting to say something about yourself. Enter the corporation.

Caring about Global Others

Showing YOU Care – About You

Way to Go YOU

Everything we do, you do. You stop by for a coffee. And just by doing that, you let Starbucks buy more coffee from farmers who are good to their workers, community and planet. Starbucks bought 65% of our coffee this way last year–228 million pounds–and we’re working with farmers to make it 100%. It’s using our size for good, and you make it all possible. Way to go, you!” (emphasis original)

Showing You Care and Paying for It

New forms of absolution?

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Starbucks Slips, 2007 Big Question – Why?

Can’t Make Class Distinctions Anymore

Fighting Ubiquity Losing the Showing You

Care Business

Losing the Showing You Care Business

Losing the Coffee Knowledge Battle (and the Class Bang that

went with it)

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Re-imagining the Brand Starbucks – The Ordinary

How does Starbucks get the Mojo Back?

Can it recover?

Really how as it recovered? (Global strategies)

Becoming the Gap?

Being Everywhere. Losing Scarcity.