Marketing Intimacy

Written: April, 2008

Last year, a new drive-through Starbucks opened about a mile from me on the increasingly congested eye-sore known as Beechmont Avenue.

At the time, I half-jokingly said to my wife: "Drive through will be the death of the Starbucks brand."

Well, the brand is far from dead, but as most people know, it is in a world of hurt. Several weeks ago, Time ran an excellent feature story on the return of founder Howard Schultz in the wake of Starbuck's first-ever drop in same-store sales. Read Time article It seems as if the spirit that made Starbucks one of the world's great brands gave way to the desire to just sell more coffee and even more “stuff.”

As our industry struggles to wrap its head around the notion of "brand engagement," perhaps we should consider the one brand that was built on a single minded commitment to engagement: Starbucks. Howard Schultz' vision of Starbucks being the "third place" to go during the day had nothing to do with coffee---or CDs, egg & cheese sandwiches, stuffed animals and $250 Espresso machines, for that matter. Starbucks evolved out of a notion of customer intimacy. It was the "place" that was special. There are plenty of places to go for a decent cup of coffee. But Starbucks is the one place to go to "meet someone” over a cup of coffee.

That's why I always felt that drive-through at Starbucks is completely counter-intuitive to the company’s founding vision. Brand engagement is about the customer experience. For Starbucks, the customer experience was in the store. Drive through may have expanded the opportunity for incremental volume, but it took the customer out of the essential Starbucks experience---it removed the intimacy.

I’m intrigued by the notion of customer intimacy as it relates to brand engagement. We use brand engagement as a fairly generic, all-encompassing concept. But is it all encompassing? Do some product/service categories involve greater levels of customer intimacy than others and, thus, require different approaches to engagement?

For example, most CPG products are utilitarian with short purchase cycles and a minimum amount of consumer interest and involvement. As marketers, we are essentially far-removed from the ultimate “customer experience” as it starts in the store and ends in the home. In this regard, mass media still plays a critical role in maintaining brand awareness and reinforcing brand affinity. I maintain that it is difficult and ultimately inefficient to build and maintain a truly intimate dialogue with CPG “brand ambassadors.”

On the other hand, categories such as restaurants or fast food afford tremendous opportunity for customer intimacy and marketing approaches that are highly engagement-focused. Every day, people make the decision to walk into Long John Silvers, for instance. Many of these people are passionate customers who would readily become brand ambassadors. The opportunity to build a more intimate dialogue with these loyal customers is, I believe, the essence of brand engagement and the key to driving stronger ROI for the client.

Brand engagement, to me, is the bridge that links mass communication to customer intimacy. Every product or service sits somewhere on this bridge. Our opportunity is to create the discipline that helps clients identity where they sit on the engagement bridge in order to help model the best mix of on/off-line, traditional and non-traditional marketing elements.

If you would like to discuss this in more detail, I’d be happy to meet you at Starbucks!

DS