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. With Status & Starbucks
Posted Under: Murketing
According to The Los Angeles Times, Lions Gate spent $20 million marketing the film Akeelah and the Bee, which has grossed $17 million. The most famous piece of the marketing strategy was a deal with Starbucks, and the paper says Lions Gate executives are “privately” disappointed in how that worked out. Meanwhile, a Starbucks exec defends the campaign: “How we measure our success is not always in terms of box-office receipts but our customers’ reception.” The definitive Starbucks-watching blog, Starbucks Gossip, wonders: “Is there *anybody* at Starbucks corporate who is honest enough to admit that this venture flopped?”
Here’s a theory:
While the official spin on Starbucks “getting into the entertainment business” or whatever has always been that the move signals the way a high-end coffee chain can leverage a sort of cultural tastemaker status into new profit centers, I’ve never really believed that. I think what they’re really doing is associating themselves with “good culture” products to burnish the notion that there’s something special about Starbucks. Something special enough to justify their prices, I mean.
With “good” coffee cheap and plentiful these days, the Starbucks premium has less to do with the actual coffee, and more to do with the Starbucks image, or rather the self-image of the Starbucks customer. Starbucks needs to find new ways to seem elite, not mass (and let’s face it, it’s totally mass). Selling Ray Charles CDs might generate some money, but it mostly pays off in the form of the suggestion that the Starbucks consumer is the kind of person who buys Ray Charles CDs. (It’s not like Starbucks “broke” Ray Charles.) Being associated with a critically acclaimed indie movie pays off in the form of the suggestion that Starbucks consumers are the kind of people who see indie movies — or (to go a little meta) even the suggestion that they are seen that way by others. And selling ethical bottled water (something I wrote about earlier this year) has a similar payoff.
To Starbucks, in other words, it’s less important to move Good Cultural Products than it is be associated with Good Cultural Products. It doesn’t lend status to those things, it borrows status from them.
Of course, if Starbucks ends up being associated with Failed Cultural Products, then eventually the strategy backfires.
Just a theory….
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Reader Comments
Absolutely. Wasn’t that the idea, loosely, behind Joe magazine? Does anyone remember Joe? Their heavy, thick, tasteful lifestyle magazine that wasn’t about coffee per se. The magazine failed, perhaps, but it paved the way for the early days of super-designy-coffee accessories and cool board games like Crainum (or whatever they started carrying). The ventures don’t always work on their own but they do seem to be creating a coherent path to the next thing.
I do remember Joe, although I had forgotten about it. I would say that Joe could be seen as evidence that at the time Starbucks believed it really did have the status to create Good Cultural Products of its own, spinoffs of its brand in different forms, etc. But they learned that they couldn’t. So instead they’ve shifted to the current strategy of associating themselves with Good Cultural Products created by others, in a fairly clever way that leaves a vague impression that Starbucks is sort of a curataor. So maybe if they did something like that again, they wouldn’t create it themselves, they’d just start distributing, I don’t know, The Believer or something.