06 Mar 2007 0718H

Starbucks: the more managed the experience becomes. . .

Starbucks everywhere, all the time

. . . the less authentic it feels. In its mad dash to the top, Starbucks has lost its way, according to its chairman. He feels it has become commoditized. Undifferentiated. Soulless. (I know. He finally noticed?) He blames bagged coffee, automated espresso machines, profit expectations that come from being publicly traded. But at one point, I think he comes close to the truth:

However, one of the results has been stores that no longer have the soul of the past and reflect a chain of stores vs. the warm feeling of a neighborhood store. Some people even call our stores sterile, cookie cutter, no longer reflecting the passion our partners feel about our coffee. In fact, I am not sure people today even know we are roasting coffee. You certainly can’t get the message from being in our stores. The merchandise, more art than science, is far removed from being the merchant that I believe we can be and certainly at a minimum should support the foundation of our coffee heritage. Some stores don’t have coffee grinders, French presses from Bodum, or even coffee filters.

He slips a bit at the end.

I wanted to blog about this tribal behavior between the Starbucks tribe and the Dunkin Donuts tribe a while back but didn’t snag it fast enough. Each one is looking to the other to understand what the experience of coffee brings to people’s lives. But that is not leadership. I don’t know if there’s any ethnography, to observe the customer in their habitat, that they can fall back on that can improve the experience, but it seems that they can use it to start uncovering the problems.

Observation of the users in their environment can be used with other change leadership techniques to identify problems in the experience and point to solutions. For instance, in a variant of the Five Whys, we can ask, why do we need to install automated machines? Because we need to serve the customer faster. But why do we need to serve the customer faster? Because there is a line of people waiting to get them. And so on, until we get to the root cause. I don’t have any answers here because I don’t have any domain knowledge and the people who do are all working in this space. But it seems that you can start by looking not at your bagging of beans, machines, or your own passion for coffee, which are all important of course, but about what the customers expect and want from Starbucks and are going there to accomplish. And if that means you have an express espresso line to separate out the folks to go, from the folks for here, or you work more on bringing back the much vaunted Third Space for people, or you make less profit by buying back shares and taking yourselves back to a smaller size but a much higher quality experience, well, that all speaks for itself, I think.

There’s a Starbucks inside the frickin’ Forbidden City of all places. The experience, being ubiquitous, is no longer special. Unless they reinvent themselves around what they are strong in really offering, death is inevitable.

“We are all, in some way or another, going to Reseda, someday, to die.”

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1 response to "Starbucks: the more managed the experience becomes. . ."

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06 Mar 2007 0855H

Paul (from Idea Sandbox) writes:

Thanks for linking to our discussion on Solving Starbucks Problems: One Post at a Time… I invite you and your readers to share your expertise and participate in the conversation on Brand Autopsy and Idea Sandbox… Thanks, again! - Paul

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