The Stealth of Starbucks
July 27th, 2009This worked pretty well for the Organic© industrial complex, maybe it will work for Starbucks. Although, “debranding” didn’t go so well for my last employer. The mothership is dead now.
Via: Guardian:
Starbucks’ new stealth strategy sees it “rebranding”, or de-branding, stores to give them different names and more local “community personality”. A victim of its own success—161 branches within a five-mile radius in Central London and the famous promise to open a new one every fortnight— Starbucks has been hit by the recession and, in different ways, both by the turn to less expensive caffeine hits and a reawakening of interest in local economies. Even before the downturn, its legendary CEO, Howard Schultz, fretted about what he called the ‘watering down of the Starbucks experience’ and the loss of ‘the soul of the past’ in ‘the warm feeling of the neighborhood store’.
Nothing, obviously, that couldn’t be sourced and commodified in due course. The transformation of the quirky, the unique and the countercultural into mainstream commodity culture is not new, and Starbucks is hardly alone in enacting this relentless corporate logic. As the ubiquitous HSBC adverts insist, global success is dependent on exploiting local knowledge and cultures. Coca-Cola came to India in the 90s waving the national flag and insisting, in local languages, on its indigenity; McDonald’s succeeds in Asian countries by serving variants of local cuisines. Don’t be too surprised if fast-food joints begin to cater to the “slow food” movement, just as gigantic petroleum corporations now sport bright “green” logos.
Research Credit: ltcolonelnemo
