Brand Exhaustion and Captain Missthepoint
In college, the focus was brands – brand identity, brand strength, branding branding branding. Never mind my professor could have moonlighted as Super Douche, or that I did little to disguise my complete disgust with him and his chosen subject matter (devotion to all that is Brand. We are the Brand. You will be assimilated).
As an American, a consumer and someone who spends far too much time thinking about such things, I could have told you two years ago (and, wait, I did tell people two years ago – they laughed), that the day of the Brand was coming to an end.
We’ve seen the folly of Brand management, where the brand identity is all-powerful and all-important – to the exclusion of all other things. Protecting the Brand is priority number one, whereas the customer and his/her experience is not really much of a priority at all.
One day, companies like Starbucks will get off the crazy wagon, and stop trying to mass produce genuine individual experiences. The fact that they’re sending thugs to real corner coffee shops to try and figure out what makes them so appealing is creepy as hell. It also demonstrates that Starbucks has entered the panic phase of brand insanity.
“The new names are meant to give the stores “a community personality,” said Tim Pfeiffer, senior vice president of global design. Starbucks’ logo will be absent, with bags of the company’s coffee and other products rebranded with the 15th Avenue Coffee and Tea name.” – Starbucks Tests New Name for Stores, The Seattle Times
Is a Starbucks without the branding still a Starbucks? Will this endeavor to create a more genuine experience – one with local, personal flavor succeed, or will it smell like what it really is: rebranded bullshit? Leave your thoughts in comments.
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