ChasNote

In a piece for Business Week Jeff Jarvis, author of BuzzMachine (among other things), profiles Starbucks’s MyStarbucksIdea.com concept — an initiative Jeff calls a foray into corporate democracy. The site allows Starbucks customers to offer advice on improving its customer service, products or business practices. Starbucks (the retail chain) benefits from good ideas it may soon implement, and Starbucks (the brand) benefits by connecting with customers at higher, more emotional level — through a conversation in which customers have a voice, and Starbucks listens and responds.

“‘If [an idea] fails,” says [Starbucks CTO] Bruzzo, “our customers who are on MyStarbucksIdea ought to participate in being accountable for it.’ Whether an idea is accepted or not, customers get only the satisfaction of participating; there are no payments or other tangible rewards.”

What an excellent example of a brand-as-conversation, or what we at FM call (and Jeff often criticizes!) conversational marketing.

Nielsen numbers analyzed by Ad Age suggest that consumer do prefer green brands, products and services, but that brands that push too hard on the theme — GE and Starbucks are called out — invite scrutiny that may bring with it an online backlash.

My friend Alex Frankel is out with his second book, Punching In. (His first, Word Craft, is also worth a read, if you’re interested in how products get named.)

In Punching In, Frankel joins on with the “brand armies” — the platoons of rank and file front-end staffers — at UPS, Starbucks, Gap and Apple Stores to better understand how brands express themselves through the uniforms, trained behaviors and scripted speech of their entry-level employees. From the introduction:

“The new ‘retail environments’ and ’store experiences’ that increasingly surround us and draw us into daily interactions demand more of workers than the mechanical work that [19th Century industrial theorist Frederick Winslow] Taylor studied to develop theories on work efficiency…. Beyond studying workers’ movements, some companies had come to study their minds, to find better ways to win them over, to make them believers.”

For brands like Starbucks to capture the premiums they charge, they need their retail employees to convince us that the premium is worth it; service brands need to start their brand marketing efforts right there in the HR department.

Last Friday at Butler Shine’s Influx Ideas conference, Jonah Bloom presented his take on the future of advertising. One point in particular resonated for me (among many, many interesting points): A generation ago, there was no such thing as an industry serving our personal storage needs. In 2006, storing the stuff we don’t use is a $23 billion business in the US alone.

There are two ways to make sense of this development. One, an extrapolation of Barbara Ehrenreich’s argument in Nickel and Dimed, would be that housing costs have inflated more quickly than the rest of the stuff that goes in the house — so we all have more stuff than house to keep it in. Or two, Bloom’s perspective, is that our material needs in this country are more than fulfilled, we literally have more goods than we need or use. (I’m guessing both would agree that the non-material needs of the US population — say affordable health care or good public schools — are yet a long way from fulfillment for most.)

To an audience of marketers and agency folks, Bloom’s message was pointed. Successful brands need to move beyond pitching their products and services as goods to fulfill existing customer needs — the rational, direct-response side of marketing. They need to move into the emotional arena of creating “wants” that their brands fulfill. The desire, say, to be seen as hip or fashionable or smart or innovative. In West Coast media circles, this demand-creation concept is often dismissed as irrational, and the people who encourage it (brand marketing departments, agency execs, publishers and, of course, New Yorkers) as the “friction” that technology should eliminate.

I wonder what Starbucks, with their $4 lattes, and Porsche, with VW parts hiding beneath a premium brand and price tag, would say to a future of advertising based on rational thinking?