How Starbucks gave iPhone a mullet

The iPhone has been drifting more and more into the business world since it was first released as the “cool kid’s phone” complete with slick features but no real substance. Where the first generation phone sported no teeth in the way of actually being useful to the corporate world, today’s third generation is a much matured model with Exchange, over-air sync, push notifications and, yes, copy and paste. Finally, BlackBerry users are beginning to find real reasons to make the switch aside from just looking cool.

But now Starbucks is taking the iPhone to a new business level: e-commerce. Yesterday, the coffee giant released its first two second and third apps for the iPhone, including one that allows Starbucks gift card users to track and reload their cards on the go. The other allows users to locate a nearby Starbucks location and create custom drinks for themselves or assign them to contacts stored in their phone. The app will also make recommendations based on flavor preferences.

These might not sound like big deals, but that’s not what’s motivating me to write. Amazon, Chipotle and Target are among a slew of companies who have already made significant e-commerce apps for the iPhone, so this sounds like nothing new.

What’s exciting to me is a new feature Starbucks is testing that allows users to create their drink, which pulls up a bar code that can be scanned right at the register.

That’s right. No more repeating your crazy concoction and strange preferences. No longer will black coffee-drinking guys have to awkwardly call out their wife’s girly beverage. It’s your way, right away but silently.

The new feature is being tested in 16 stores up and down the West Coast, but Starbucks hopes to roll it out nationwide in the future. If it works out, this could be an exciting new way for consumers to shop, bridging online purchases in a brick and mortar environment.This is a boost for Starbucks, but also a major lift for Apple whether they know it or not.

The only problem iPhone faces now is what to do with its new haircut. The phone’s always had a party-boy’s long hair style, but now it’s trimming the front as it matures into a useful, business friendly tool for businesses and consumers alike.

That’s a mullet if I’ve ever seen one.

It’s Starbucks, but not Starbucks

It’s already been reported in blogs and newspapers in the last week, but I find it really interesting that Starbucks is experimenting with localizing their stores. In fact, these new test locations are so immersed in culture of the local community that Starbucks dropped its ubiquity (and brand equity) by ditching its own name and logo.

New menu.

New drinks.

New products.

I, for one, am torn between the move toward a more personalized experience and the seemingly inauthentic masked parade of being something that they aren’t. Frappucinos and mild coffee are as polarizing as they are popular and Starbucks knows they can’t diversify every one of their existing stores to cater to the needs of every local culture.

My hunch is that Starbucks wants to have their cake and eat it too when it comes to playing a specialty coffee house and Wall Street sweetheart. It’s the game of catering to the lowest common denoninator while claiing to be what made you great in the first place.

Either way, the move toward localization is telling of Starbucks’ forecast on the economic future: there’s still plenty of room in the premium market and people are still willing to trade up for a personalized experience.

However, in addition to national adversiaries like McDonald’s and Dunkin’ Donuts, Starbucks has a new serious competitor in the coffee market: the independent cafe. It takes 100 percent all-beef authenticity to win that game and Starbucks has a major uphill battle to convince people that a Starbucks without the name Starbucks really is not a Starbucks.

Did you follow that?

Networking social networks

I’ve noticed lately that many organizations are still treating social networks as separate worlds.

Facebook activity stays on Facebook.

Twitter updates stay on Twitter.

Flickr photos stay put in Flickr.

YouTube and Vimeo videos stay in their profile pages.

And the list goes on.

Last week, I noted the successful campaign I recently put together for Foursquare Connection 2009, but I think it deserves another callout for doing what social networks were meant to do: provide a platform to help people interact when and wherever they happen to be.

The deal is, most people have accounts to two or more social networks. That’s why we see companies like Starbucks with YouTube, Facebook and Twitter accounts. Be everything to everyone, right?

No. And yes.

No, because just having an online presence isn’t the same as interacting. Opening accounts and posting infrequent updates, photos and videos is simple but hardly passes for an internet marketing strategy.

Yes, because this is where your audience lives online. You could spend a pretty dime creating and maintaing your own social network—but why when there are plenty of free options available that are constantly improving themselves for you?

The trick is to not treat all your accounts as separate entities, but as a single platform. Facebook allows you to updatet your status through Twitter. Flickr feeds photos perfectly into Facebook and Vimeo. Vimeo and YouTube give you the embed codes to every video you upload to publish them on other sites. The number of third party Twitter applications to feed your tweets to any website is ridiculously ubiquitous.

An open API is a beautiful thing, isn’t it?

I’m happy to see mega-brands like Starbucks investing in people to manage their presence in online social networks. However, watching them treat their accounts as individual platforms with different people managing each site makes me think they are missing a bigger opportunity to interact with people on different levels. Each social network is like a different sense (taste, look, sound, smell, feel) and bridging them together is the best way to interact with an audience on every level.

On that note, not all flavors will taste good to your audience. So when your team is sitting down to plan a strategy for social networking (yes, it does require an intentional plan), consider the following:

• Where is our audience hanging out online? Are they even online?
• What kind of content do we have to share?
• What social networks are already available to us?
• How do we plan to add value to the conversations happening in these networks?
• How can these networks work together?
• Can we connect users of one network to users in another?
• Who do we want to assign to keep our networks current? (No, your boss’s 15-year old nephew does not count.)
• Can any of our networks be plugged into our current website?

This is just a start, but answering these questions will open up a huge conversation.

Playing center field

I was having a great conversation with my brother the other day about Starbucks while sitting in a Starbucks.

The problem with Starbucks is not so much the quality of their coffee, their commitment to ethically produced and traded beans, their level of customer service, or even their rate of growth—all of which are actually sound for such a bohemeth of a company. The problem is actually their commitment—or lack thereof—to a position in the marketplace.

Once a single store dedicated to selling the highest quality whole bean coffee by catalog, Starbucks has become the Frappacino blending, caramel drizzling, instant coffee manufacturing, automatic espresso brewing mega-chain that is a lot less focused on the handcrafted quality it once preached. And all for a premium, handcrafted quality price.

By playing to the lowest common denominator, Starbucks works harder to satisfy a mass market than the die-hard coffee connoisseurs that drove the business to the success it enjoys today. Well, at least the success they enjoyed before today. After closing 600 stores in 2008 and 300 more expected to close this year, the company is losing momentum for the first time in its fabled history.

Blame it on the economy if you want or call it a loss of soul, but the real issue has to do with the Starbucks’ refusal to decide whether it is more focused on quality or quantity. By trying to have it both ways, they blatantly snub the people who are truly passionate about coffee and set their prices so high that the fickle mass market can easily squeeze it out of their spending when economic times get tough.

In other words, they’re playing center field when playing left or right will produce more returns.

My unqualified advice? Ditch the bottles, cans, caramel drizzle, fruit juices, instant coffee, powders, food, discount combos and anything else the real coffee lover cares nothing about. Sure, this will tick off a huge number of people who come in every now and then in the summers for their favorite ice-blended drink. But they’re fickle in the first place, remember? The worst thing a company like Starbucks can do is try to commit to a customer base who has no interest in returning that same level of commtment to them—especially when there is a huge audience already crying for their attention.

Doing so is a strategy that only pays off and makes investors happy in the short-run. If Starbucks has a commitment to long-term growth they have to get there by making a commitment to playing the right position—not loitering in the middle.

Get what you pay for

There was a line at Starbucks this afternoon.

No news here. A good guess is that there are long lines at many Starbucks locations at any given moment.

The difference today was how long it took to make my way up to the front. I waited for awhile, checking my invisible watch often and tapping my foot anxiously. I was just about to cry “Party Foul!” on the baristas for dragging their feet when it hit me: the delay was coming from my side of the counter.

Of the five people standing in front of me, three had cell phones glued to their ears. (Four if you count Blue Tooth dude, complete with Wild West cell phone hip holster. These holsters, by the way, are the New Millennium version of a fanny pack; but I digress.) Prior to greeting each customer, the barista had to either wait patiently for the phone call to end or try to translate awkward hand movements in an even more awkward game of retail charades.

This may say something about the use of cell phones in general, but I think it says more about what customers have come to expect from the service industry. I think what it says becomes even more apparent when you see one of those callers berating the barista for making the wrong drink.

As customers, we’ve grown up in an environment that has always touted us for being right—-even in spite our shortcomings. “The customer is always right” is undoubtedly retail’s Golden Rule. And to a degree, it’s also perfectly right. Building brand loyalty is paramount to all small misgivings and giving customers what they want in so-called “non-situations” makes both parties feel good in the long run.

But where do we draw the line? (I use the universal “we” to refer to all us consumers.)

We all desire to be treated well for patronizing brands. After all, our cash is helping to line their pockets and receiving it is their privilege—-not their right. Excellent customer service has become a natural extension of any excellent product. You almost cannot separate the two.

When our behavior as customers becomes anything less than courteous, however, and starts to resemble blatant rudeness and whining, we have definitely crossed the line. Before we can cry “Party Foul!” on the poor service we may or may not have received, we have to acknowledge whether or not we ever gave the chance to receive excellent service.

Maybe it’s time to hang up the phones and engage in real conversations.

The execution of stigma

I’m slowly creeping though the pages of John Grisham’s latest book, The Innocent Man. Normally, I’d plow through something like this but, like most people, I am short on time. Consequently, I earn funny looks from my friendly Starbucks barista because I have brought the same book with me for a coffee break everyday this past month.

Tanya the Barista: [Raised eyebrows.]

Me: “But this is the only time I actually get to open the book.”

Tanya the Barista: “You know, Hooked on Phonics did wonders for my brother.”

Me: “Touché.”

The point of this is not so much my failed attempts to convince someone else that, from the hour between 1-2pm, I am something other than a slow reader. Actually, maybe it is.

Do you ever find yourself stuck with a bad rap? Whether it’s the person who sees you as the “Suck Up,” the other who looks you up and down as a terrible dresser, or another who can’t get past a bad hair day you had one time last year, there is this tendency we have to stigmatize each other. Call it the Seinfeld Complex. Remember the episode where Jerry scratches one side of his nose just as another person passes on the other side? “It was a SCRATCH!” Jerry emphatically exclaimed multiple times during the show, because he loathed the thought of being seen as the Nose Picker.

(Yeah, that episode rocked.)

I suppose the Seinfeld Complex works both ways. For every bad reputation a person has, there is probably an equally positive one to match it. You might be the “Flaky” friend to one person, but the expeditiously diligent to another. It just goes to show that we carry many labels and titles, but rarely are they the ones that we would like to brand on ourselves, if given the choice.

Ron Williamson is the central figure of Grisham’s book. He was a mentally-ill man wrongly convicted (hence, the title) of murder and sent to Death Row in the State of Oklahoma. During the course of his 12 years of imprisonment, he was branded as a ruthless killer despite any shred of evidence that proved beyond a reasonable doubt that he, in fact, was just that. DNA evidence later exonerated him of the charges and he was a free man.

(Can you see where I am going with this?)

After an alibi, an impartial judge and scientific proof excluded Williamson as a murderer, he continued to receive death threats and bear the scarlet letter of something he was not and did not deserve. Even the victim’s family was largely convinced he was involved in the killing following the acquittal. In fact, if Williamson had any celebrity status whatsoever prior to his legal juggernaut, he could be another O.J. Simpson… umm, except that he actually didn’t murder someone.

(See, even I can’t drop the label once it is applied and worn.)

Sometimes the stigma is as epic as a mass murderer. Then again, sometimes it’s as harmless as a nose picker. Regardless, it serves as a reminder that we are drastically defined by the people, places and things with which we are associated and, not to mention, the actions we make. Do you consider yourself to be the person that others see through their eyes?

We can spend our time worrying about the impressions we leave with others. But if we do, then we run the risk of basing everyday decisions on the way people look at us.

“Am I wearing the right shoes with this shirt?”

“Is there a better phone I can have to make me look important?”

“Will this car make me seem sexy?”

“Do my blog entries make me sound smart?”

You be the judge.

(Tea) Party like it’s 1995

I am a Saturday morning person. When it comes to waking up after a Friday night, my motto is “the earlier, the better.” Sure, I may feel tired at first but that’s when I look myself in the mirror, stop acting groggy, and start feeling awesome. True story.

The most crucial part of my Saturdays is the trip to (where else?) Starbucks. This is the time I get to party like it’s 1995 and read the morning paper over black coffee. Without fail, the same thought sails through my mind each week, which is, The Los Angeles Times, and every other newspaper for that matter, can cut out the middle. Have you ever noticed that? The top news is in the front and Sports is packaged at the end, even behind the Classifieds. It’s more like a worthless sandwich: the meat is on the outside and the marbled rye is in the middle. Go figure.

But I seriously digress. I sat myself down this morning in one of those plush purple chairs. (I do that sometimes and pretend I’m sitting on big fuzzy grape – which is certainly something I would not recommend eating.) Several tables were situated around me and conversation wafted through the air like Tacoma Aroma.

One table at 10 o’clock from my view featured three ladies crocheting scarves out of yarn. (See, I told you I party like it’s 1995.) A newspaper sat perfectly in the table’s center, Saddam Hussein’s face glaring upward in a daze.

Woman #1: Oh, I heard about that man.

Woman #2: What man?

Woman #1: The one in the paper.

Woman #3: You’re just now hearing about him?

Woman #1: No, but he interrupted my program last night. I missed Matlock.

[Okay, Matlock is my insertion.]

Ten years ago, I may have pulled the ignorance alarm on this conversation. Back then, I would have thought, “Are you seriously unwilling to part with a half-hour re-run of Sanford & Son to hear what is making history today?”

What’s changed since then is the radical ways in which we receive information. With exception to Saturdays, I get my news on demand from dozens of papers over the Internet. My TiVo acts as my couch potato assistant. Google Calendar sends me an alert each morning to remind me where I’m supposed to be and at what time. And what’s more, all of this can be done anytime and anywhere thanks to my WiFi-absorbing MacBook.

So, yes. Why should this lady have to miss out on Matlock? Ten years ago, a live Breaking News broadcast was the cutting-edge way for a TV station to distribute key information and reap major ratings. Now Nielson Scans are a wash because live television is quickly becoming a thing of the past. Of course we want our Breaking News… just let us get it when we want it and how we want it. That’s the power of consumer choice and it’s finally available in the marketplace.

If anything, wasting my time in the middle of my favorite program (live or TiVo’d) just makes network TV look more archaic than anything else. Time to stop getting obsolete and start being awesome!

I actually learned something today from a sewing circle.

The I Ching of Caffeine

Five people stood in front of and behind me today in line at Starbucks, pressing me into the compact café like a skinny latté. The setting rarely varies from week-to-week, day-to-day, or, come to think of it, even hour-to-hour. Bluetooth and BlackBerries are the make up of those standing while laptops and black suits fill the tables in the lobby.

“Five pump Chai,” is what the lady at the register orders. “Oh, and no water please,” she tags on as the barista scurries back toward the bar.

“Black and white mocha, no whip and nonfat,” the next man in line follows.

The barista makes her way up the line methodically, paying meticulous attention to each order. In many ways I think her job is more like that a foreign translator than a café employee in the middle of huge outdoor mall.

“Iced tea, passion, venti, light ice.”

“Double-tall-two-percent-coconut-caramel-macchiato.”

It almost seems each order is enunciated in such a way as to one up the drink before.

Starbucks has created this place where we can blurt out a drinkable personality. Besides the clothes we wear and the cars we drive, we can, as Tom Hanks claims in You’ve Got Mail, “for only $2.95, get not just a cup of coffee but an absolutely defining sense of self.”

People whom I have never met before, will probably never see again, and have come from places all around the world are now jam packed together in the same line. Under any other circumstance, we would probably be offended to be in such close proximity to others. However, something about a finely ground bean grown in some other continent has us united in a mildly addictive sort of way. [Insert patriotic anthem or theme from Titanic here.]

And now, like Sylvia Browne, I can stare deep into the souls of my fellow caffeine fiends and know something about them you won’t find on their Social Security cards: what they chose to enjoy on a sunny December afternoon in Newport Beach.

The barista made her way to me, prepared to take my order. Feeling encouraged by the intimate environment and everyone’s willingness to share a bit of themselves, I declared my beverage!

“Grande coffee!”

The barista put her pen down and hypnotically walked back to the coffee pot and poured me a cup. “Next,” she continued.

I guess I shared my defining sense of boringness. So much for grandstanding.

Beachfront Notes & Imaginings, Part II

Dreary days at the beach are my favorite of them all. This is especially true at two during a weekday afternoon. The only people who are out here are those who really would rather be nowhere else. The sun is behind stacked clouds that threaten rain, the oil ships are forming a longer line than normal, and you can forget about bare feet in this cold, wet, clumpy expanse that used to be sand. Who else comes out here, but those with a purpose?

Of course, I stopped for an objective glance.

- I’m not sure when it happens, but there is a noticeable shift in the type of coffee people drink. When do we give up iced americanos for caramel apple ciders? The conspiracy theorist in me wants to believe that Starbucks creates seasons like Hallmark invented the holiday. Truthfully, though, I prefer a more romantic explanation that involves an internal mechanism telling us when we desire warmth. Today, everyone on the beach is in search of that need for personal fulfillment and comfort.

- A couple walks together along the water’s edge. They grab my attention because it’s apparent they planned this stroll. They appear affluent, like each stepped casually off the pages of a Banana Republic catalog. They can’t be older than 30. They also can’t be unemployed. I bet they conspired together over email to leave work and rendezvous at lunch just to get a few more moments in together. They’re probably overachievers and rarely get spend personal time together during the work week.

“What if we just left for an afternoon?” she types. “We have a lifetime of work ahead of us.” He shows up twenty minutes later with a bundle of gerbera daisies and Two-Buck Chuck from Trader Joe’s.

OK, maybe I’m merely projecting my own fantasy here. Where’s my caramel apple cider?

- Dog walkers. Lots and lots of dog walkers. A spider web of red, blue, black, and pink leashes dances around each person. The dogs pull every which way and makes me wonder how they get anywhere at all. Long Beach is a city of canine enthusiasts. My brother’s Yorkshire Terrier has a wardrobe that is larger than my own and most other dogs are just as spoiled in this city. Just last Sunday, Belmont Shore hosted its annual Haute Dog Halloween costume parade. We already are amused when we notice that a dog is very much like its owner – imagine when a dog is dressed up in the same bumble bee costume as its owner, wings, stripes, and all. It’s simultaneously repulsive and adorable. It’s repulsively adorable… and nearly makes me spew cotton candy.

- A full-blown Yoga class is taking place on the strip of grass directly behind me. I feel self-conscious for them as they stretch and contort their bodies in front of the grid-locked traffic that clogs up Ocean Avenue this afternoon. I am so fascinated that bodies are pliable enough to hold even half of the poses that these people are able to do. Now I’m the self-conscious one because I don’t want to be that lonely stray guy who lures on the beach to scope out bendy exercises.

I move on and leave. People watching is over for one day.