Pour Your Heart Into It (35 page)

Romancing all the senses in the store experience.
At Starbucks, our product is not just great coffee but also what we call the “Starbucks experience”: an inviting, enriching environment in our stores that is comfortable and accessible yet also stylish and elegant.

More and more, I realize, customers are looking for a Third Place, an inviting, stimulating, sometimes even soulful respite from the pressures of work and home. People come to Starbucks for a refreshing time-out, a break in their busy days, a personal treat. Their visit has to be rewarding. If any detail is wrong, the brand suffers. That’s why we love the saying, “Everything matters.”

In effect, our stores are our billboards. Customers form an impression of the Starbucks brand the minute they walk in the door. The ambience we create there has as much to do with brand-building as the quality of the coffee.

Every Starbucks store is carefully designed to enhance the quality of everything the customers see, touch, hear, smell, or taste. All the sensory signals have to appeal to the same high standards. The artwork, the music, the aromas, the surfaces all have to send the same subliminal message as the flavor of the coffee:
Everything here is best-of-class
.

What’s the first thing you notice when you approach a Starbucks store? Almost always, it’s the aroma. Even non–coffee drinkers love the smell of brewing coffee. It’s heady, rich, full-bodied, dark, suggestive. Aroma triggers memories more strongly than any of the other senses, and it obviously plays a major role in attracting people to our stores.

Keeping that coffee aroma pure is no easy task. Because coffee beans have a bad tendency to absorb odors, we banned smoking in our stores years before it became a national trend. We ask our partners to refrain from using perfume or cologne. We won’t sell chemically flavored coffee beans. We won’t sell soup, sliced pastrami, or cooked food. We want you to smell coffee only.

The sounds that fill our stores also contribute to the brand image. Until recently, our signature music has been classical or jazz instrumentals, but lately Timothy Jones has started to vary the musical mood with opera, blues, reggae, even Broadway show tunes. But music is only one element of what you hear. After you place your order, you’ll usually hear the cashier call out the name of your drink, and then hear it echoed back by the barista. The hiss of the espresso machine, the clunk-clunk as the barista knocks the coffee grounds out of the filter, the bubbling of the milk steaming in a metal pitcher, and, at the bean counter, the swish of the metal scoop shoveling out a half-pound of beans, the clatter as they hit the scale—for our customers, these are all familiar, comforting sounds.

To match the warm feel of the cup in their hands, we have to pay attention to everything the customers touch: the style of the chairs, the edges of the countertops, the texture of the slate floors. Even cleanliness is part of the store experience, and it’s one factor we monitor regularly, using “mystery shoppers” who pose as customers and rate each location on a series of criteria.

We build the romance of coffee into the visual design of every store. Many include displays of coffee beans at different stages of roasting, from the green raw beans to the cinnamon roast used for most canned coffee to the dark Starbucks roast—with an explanation of why we believe in roasting dark. Our latest store design brings the coffee beans out from their drawers and into large metal hoppers, a feature that piques people’s curiosity and gets them asking questions.

We keep our look fresh by designing colorful banners and posters to evoke specific moods during different seasons, enriching the Starbucks brand with visual impact and interest. We receive hundreds of requests from customers for copies of their favorite posters, the most popular of which included an early one of Sumatra tigers and three original images of the siren we commissioned for our twenty-fifth anniversary from artists known in 1971 for their psychedelic imagery. We even use the cups themselves to carry messages, including three “chapters” of our history printed on cups during our twenty-fifth anniversary celebration.

The way merchandise is displayed also reflects on the brand. We pore over every detail and have great debates about whether or not to offer various products: Do bags of polenta reinforce or harm the brand image? Wristwatches? Jelly beans? We even work directly with Italian artisans to create original designs and hand-paint our mugs.

Authentic brands do not emerge from marketing cubicles or advertising agencies. They emanate from everything the company does, from store design and site selection to training, production, packaging, and merchandise buying. In companies with strong brands, every senior manager has to evaluate each decision by asking: “Will it strengthen or dilute the brand?”

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In Seattle, it took fifteen years for great whole-bean coffee to catch on. It took five years for espresso drinks. Yet, somehow, we underestimated how much time we would need to capture imaginations in other cities.

When we went into Chicago in 1987, we were so confident that we had developed a captivating formula that we took it for granted that customers would automatically come flocking. What we hadn’t taken into account, however, was that our word-of-mouth reputation had not preceded us. Few people outside Seattle knew what Starbucks stood for.

From that experience, we learned that it wasn’t enough to simply open our stores and assume customers would come. We had to create advance excitement in each city we prepared to enter. How could we get people to start talking about Starbucks the day we opened our first store in their neighborhood? With each market we entered, we learned new techniques, so that by 1994 and 1995, when we rapidly accelerated the number of new market openings, we had developed a multi-pronged approach.

Jennifer Tisdel, our vice president for retail marketing since 1992, organized a market entry strategy that began by hiring a local public relations firm to help us understand the heritage and concerns of a given city. Early in our store-opening sequence we always picked a flagship site, a very visible location in a busy part of the city, to build a high-profile store, such as those in Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C., and Astor Place in New York’s Greenwich Village.

At the same time, our creative people designed artwork that celebrated each city’s personality, whether it was Paul Revere and the name Beantown for Boston, twin coffee cups for the Twin Cities, a peach-shaped coffee cup for Atlanta, or New York’s Statue of Liberty drinking coffee. We used the artwork on commuter mugs, T-shirts, and invitations for our partners and customers.

Unlike most other retail stores, coffeehouses are places where people naturally come together, so we try to integrate our stores into the fabric of their local communities. For each new market, we planned at least one big community event to celebrate our arrival, with the proceeds going to a local charity. In Boston and Atlanta, Kenny G gave benefit concerts, to which we invited local leaders.

Before each opening, we assembled a list of people who could serve as local “ambassadors” for Starbucks. We started by asking our partners if they had friends or family in that city, whom we then invited to pre-opening or Grand Opening events, along with local shareholders, mail-order customers, and sponsors of CARE or other causes we support. We sent them each two free-drink coupons with a note asking them to “Share Starbucks with a friend.” We held tastings with local reporters, food critics, chefs, and owners of well-regarded restaurants. To give our baristas a chance to practice, we let them invite their friends and family to pre-opening parties, where the coffee and pastries were free, with a suggested $3 donation to a local nonprofit group. Finally, we’d throw a Grand Opening party, usually the Saturday after the store opened, sometimes with thousands attending.

Community events and sponsorships became an ongoing part of our marketing work, in part to build awareness but also because we believe it’s the right thing to do. In addition to our support of CARE, we try to be sensitive to local issues, with our main emphasis on supporting AIDS programs; children’s causes, especially children’s hospitals; the environment, with a focus on clean water; and the arts, especially jazz and film festivals. For the past several years, 300 to 400 Starbucks partners and customers have marched in Seattle’s annual AIDS walk. We have also developed a partnership with Doernbecher Children’s Hospital in Portland that included selling specially designed commuter mugs; sponsored film festivals in Toronto, San Francisco, and Seattle; and raised money for Rhode Island’s Save the Bay project. These activities, only a few of hundreds we’ve sponsored, grow directly out of our Mission Statement, which states our commitment to “contribute positively to our communities and our environment.” Not only do these sponsorships create goodwill, but they also have a positive effect internally, making our partners proud to be associated with a company that gives back.

In the weeks after each opening, we often set up a reward system to thank our customers for their repeat business. Starting in 1993, we issued
passports
that entitled customers to a free half-pound of coffee once they had taken a
world tour
by trying coffee beans from different origin countries. In other cities, we invited them to try five different beverages, after which they were given a free local market tumbler.

We also offer company-wide printed in-store materials, which provide information for customers interested in learning more about coffee. Each store carries a display of brochures, including
The World of Coffee,
which details the different tastes of each type of whole-bean coffee we sell;
The Best Coffee at Home,
on how to grind and brew whole-bean coffee; and
A Quick Guide to Starbucks Specialty Beverages,
with diagrams explaining such drinks as cappuccino and caffè latte.

In addition, we publish and distribute
Coffee Matters
, a monthly newsletter focusing on the romance and culture of coffee through the ages. We use our annual reports to tell our story as well, from sections on “romancing the bean” and the “art of roasting” in 1992 through the innovative and unusual design of our twenty-fifth anniversary annual report in 1996. Another key contributor to brand-building has been our mail-order catalogue, which allows direct communication with customers. Our 800 number provides them with immediate access to coffee experts who can knowledgeably discuss the difference between Sumatra and Sulawesi, Gold Coast and Yukon blends.

With the rapid pace of expansion, our marketing people in Seattle can no longer monitor local needs and interests as well as people in the field. In response, we have decentralized our marketing efforts, with twelve partners in four zones scattered across the United States, handling store openings, events, and sponsorships for their regions and helping ensure our company-wide efforts are relevant on a local level.

Because Starbucks delivered a higher standard at a time when so many other retailers were lowering expectations, it has emerged as a beacon in the retail business. A typical customer might say, “Wow! I come in here and I’m treated so well. And when I come back the next day, they know my name and they know my drink! And there’s a seat here, and I’m listening to jazz, and I can close my eyes and have five minutes of rest away from work and away from home. I can do it every day, and it’s for me, and it’s only a dollar fifty or two dollars. I can’t afford a vacation to Hawaii, but this is something I can treat myself to! And I can afford it every day.”

Enthusiastically satisfied customers like that are the power behind our word-of-mouth strategy. If every new store can evoke that kind of reaction, the Starbucks brand will stand for a meaningful, personal experience no matter how ubiquitous we become.

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Today, the Starbucks brand is outgrowing the walls of our stores. Increasingly, people are encountering our coffee on airlines, on cruise ships, in bookstores, in supermarkets. That broader exposure has forced us to rethink our brand positioning.

Aside from restaurants and airports, we long refused to let anyone sell Starbucks brand coffee. To protect the brand, we especially refused to make it available at drugstores, convenience stores, or gas stations. In 1993, though, Nordstrom agreed to sell our coffee. With its reputation for top-quality clothing and superior service, Nordstrom was the kind of strategic partner who, we felt certain, would enhance, not dilute, our brand. Later, when we picked supermarkets to locate kiosks in, we aimed to find ones with the top reputation in their markets, such as Quality Food Centers in Seattle.

Now that we have such new products as ice cream and bottled Frappuccino, both of which are sold in supermarkets, an innovative approach to graphics is even more crucial. Our Frappuccino bottles evoke the milk bottles of yesteryear, but are decorated with a pattern of stars and swirls that promises an unexpected taste. When we reached bottling capacity constraints, we had to consider putting Frappuccino in an aluminum can. It was a tough call, since cans connote mainstream soft drinks. But once again, we created a great design in keeping with the brand equity of Starbucks and the sub-brand of Frappuccino.

Perhaps the most intense internal debate we have had regarding product design came over our ice cream packaging. One group argued that since Starbucks was entering unfamiliar territory, we should use the well-known brand graphics and sell the ice cream in white packages with the green logo, or in the familiar terracottaand-charcoal colors of our coffee bags, with the steam pattern. Ice cream was enough of an innovation; we should pick something familiar and proven for packaging.