brand marketing blog

In an excellent post in Fortune, Kevin Maney talks about the 'almost' undoing of Starbucks in his new book Trade-Off: Why Some Things Catch On, and Others Don't (Broadway Books).

In one of his comments he says,"After a decade of stupendous success, Starbucks ran into trouble in 2007. Fewer people were coming into its stores. Profits sank. The stock dropped by nearly half through the year. In early 2008, Howard Schultz, who'd built the coffee chain into a global phenomenon, took back the CEO job he'd relinquished eight years before.

Schultz then did what any ambitious CEO would be driven to do: He took full advantage of the love shown Starbucks and launched aggressive expansion plans. If you build fidelity, the temptation is to then pursue growth. But that behavior can lead to the very thing that can kill a high fidelity brand: familiarity."

Maney presents an excellent insight into how marketing greed and the myth of 'never ending' compound growth can overtake and smother the brand essence that made it successful in the first place.

There's a powerful lesson here for all marketers, no matter if your brand is global or just a small local offering. If you stray too far from your brand essence or unique value proposition you can so easily destroy it.

Read the full post here. http://bit.ly/o2zEV