To those who care to know (and Starbucks, if I were you, I would be searching Google everyday to find out what people think of you), here are the reasons why I have made it my mission to seek out alternatives sources to feed my caffeine addiction:

1. Starbucks coffee sucks? To me, the coffee has always tasted burnt. I am not a coffee connoisseur like the good people at 2paths but even to my relatively unsophisticated coffee palette, Starbucks never felt ‘good’.
2. It all began with ‘No free internet’ (Starbucks has changed that, but it’s too late)? Ok, so this is geek reason, but it had a ripple effect that lead to #3. Basically, I don’t understand why I would have to pay a zillion dollars for a “tall” coffee and then pay for a service that should be as basic as providing lighting and mind-numbing muzac.
3. I found ‘others’. Leading from # 2, I started looking for cafes that had free internet. Free internet lead me to cafes with great coffee! Take 5 café in Vancouver is great, as is Caffé Artigiano which has amazing coffee (and terrible baked goods). Lesson: sometimes your ancillary, supporting services are the reason why people buy into your primary brand offering.
4. I heart community. In this world of remote offices and telecommuting, cafés are the new networking opportunity. Starbucks tries to create a strategically comfortable environment with its big arm chairs and carefully positioned mood lighting, but I am thinking that it takes more than just soft cushions to make for a successful third place ! For example: Take 5 café lends its location to geek events in the evenings after open hours (fringe benefit: geeks tend to drink lots of java, and do so during these events too). Result: Now geeks flock to the café at all hours of the day! If you are looking to hire your next freelance coder/designer, chances are you will find them huddled in the back of the café, working on their laptops and guzzling down their third cup of java. Lesson: big brands need to work harder to give managers the freedom to operate each store as an independent business and make ‘authentic’ community contributions not the catch-all ones that are dictated at a corporate level.
5. Anonymous service. I have worked in retail and I have worked for a large global brand, so I know that customer service training can sometimes takes the humanity out of that service. It all becomes a timed science of making eye-contact within x number of seconds and saying thank you in just the right way. Again, I suggest that Starbucks and every other mega retail brand consider going back to the idea of creating “villages” around their stores. Look to hire people who genuinely enjoy people. Look to make each store unique, different and while it can have the comfort of leveraging familiarity of the same logo, same product, it should be courageous enough to respond to a particular community’s needs. Treat that 65 year old customer differently than the 30 year old who buys a low-fat, soya latte with extra foam from you every day. Keep your humanity, and don’t correct the customer when they order a “small” coffee.
6. Laughable brand extensions. OK, I guess I am a bit of a brand Nazi but I don’t want to give my hard earned money to a brand that thinks it’s so beautiful that it should be able to sell just about anything with its logo on it. How many types of tumblers does this world really need? What do plush toys have to do with the primary product i.e. a decent cup of coffee? Lesson: create a brand that is known for what it does best, keep a laser focus on that strength and don’t deviate from that focus. You seem wasteful and self-congratulatory when you overdo the logo placements.
7. I like local more then I like global. When I go to Europe, I resist the temptation of going to any American brand restaurant. Sure it’s easy to order a Royale with cheese at McDs. And it’s a linguistic and cultural challenge communicating with the owner of a petit bistrot. “I am asking for a medium rare steak but I would prefer if the cow were not still breathing when it is served to me”. But McD’s ain’t Paris. And Starbucks doesn’t feel local. If I want to feel posh, I go to 49^th Parallel. I want to feel like I am doin’ the drive so I go to Calabria café with its somewhat garish, fake Italian statues and unpretentious attitude. I want the local environment to impact my coffee experience. I don’t want the same lighting, same music and same artwork comfort but maybe that’s just me.
8. I want to curb the infection and not encourage it. Even if you love Starbucks and can’t live without it, you too would admit that the sheer number of stores that have cropped up in the last few years is a bit nutty. Do we really need a Starbucks store across the street from..another Starbucks? Vancouver seems to be hardest hit by the fungal growth of the green logo stores. “I’ve never seen so much coffee in all my life. The whole town is on a caffeine jag,” said Bette Midler, when she performed in Vancouver.
9. If I were a coffee shop I would be. Picture it, a little cafe with the bubbly, friendly tattooed crazy coffee girl (barista would be too pretentious, and not sure why she is a girl! Frued?). The smell of food and coffee would be mixed and the air would be warm and the music would be Radiohead-ish. Strange but hey, that’s me. I tend to try and use my money to vote up the brands that reflect who I am (or want to be). Little bit of narcissistic anthropomorphism . If I were a coffee brand I hope I am not seen as a Starbucks. Apparently a study of 8000 consumers found Starbucks to be “arrogant, intrusive and self-centered“.
10. I can’t stand the thought of sameness. I said it time and again in this little list, but one of the reasons that I am so fascinated by brand creation and management. I think we need to challenge how good brands are built. The whole idea of sameness is unnecessary. The idea of wrapping a marketing message around a product is such a throwback to the industrial revolution. We are now living in emotional times. I think the future of successful brands flips the equation on its head. As this brilliant article suggests, grassroots brands are cropping up that start with an emotion or thought and then manifest into a product that reflects that emotion best, not the other way around. Starbucks started that way but along the way it seems to have shifted its focus from coffee and experiences around that drink, to growing exponentially. Something got lost along the way and got replaced with this sameness/safeness that I question.

We frequently work with companies that in the process of establishing, building or redefining their brand.

On the key exercises that I like to emphasize when building a brand from the ground up or focusing an existing brand is the importance of a brand voice.

Here’s how I see it.

Problem: We want to speak to our customer, but there are a lot of other voices that are screaming the same message to our customer. We have something unique to sell to our customer, but we are afraid that they will not be able to hear us over the din of our competitors.

1. Also called Step ZERO. Let’s forget about the competitors for a minute. You have obviously made it this far based on the assumption that you have a unique product or service offering. Or you were able to prove that there is enough room in the market for you. Hence you were able to raise the capital needed to be in existence. So, you and I both know that you have something to offer your customer. But what is it? Before we attempt to speak with “them”, let’s make sure we know WHAT we want to say to our target market. What makes our product/service worthy of their time and why should they care to keep us in business. How are we helping them?
2. Let’s talk about HOW we want to speak to them. What is our brand voice (that being the reason for this article). Country music or Country Grammar? When they exclaim “that’s hot”; do they mean the temperature of something is uncomfortably high, or do they mean that sh** is phat? Knowing your target audience’s brand voice, tells you the style and tone that your brand must have to be accessible to its market. Brand voice is not just a vocabulary; it is how successful brands clearly express their membership (or leadership) to their tribe. A brand’s voice communicates its values, principles and just who they are, to their market.

When a brand communicates clearly, it has a voice. And a brand with voice has power. Because then it can do a multitude of things and yet always find a way to communicate its brand message clearly in everything it does.

Brand voice must resonate with its target market to be successful.

Trying to fake your brand voice to make it accessible to its target audience is as offensive to your target audience as Ted Danson doing black face. Your brand shouldn’t just speak in the voice that you define, it must become it.

Defining a brand’s voice, means bringing a brand to life. Get rid of big brand standards documents that teach you how to use that logo. Instead think about making your brand into a real person. Think about who your brand is. Where do they hang out. What parties do they go to? Would you invite them over to your house? And if so, would your personal style, appeal to them or hurt their sensibilities? How will they sit at a party? In the middle of a young crowd or huddled with the small group of suits discussing the benefits of investing in tech stocks?

Knowing your brand voice means that you now know not only what you want to say, but how you want to say it.

Looking at a few 404 Error messages online, it becomes clear that even errors can speak volumes about a brand’s voice and how it communicates to it’s users.

Consider the following error messages: Basecamp, a project management tool, is both authoritative in its error messages and calm. Flickr is like your buddy, irreverent yet cool. Apple knows text lists will bore you while Windows is geekier. Google has the manner of a guy who has one piece of furniture in his one-room apartment which also houses 5 computers!

Marcus Graham takes the concept of brand voice one step further. He takes the concept of brand voice very literally. He researched 100 brand voices by recording the official automated phone greetings. So if you go to Top 100 voice brands you can actually compare what say Starbucks voice sounds like, to that of Microsoft, Apple or Charles Schwab. While I am not sure if every company has the budget to hire the best voice talent to record their company’s automated systems, the study speak to the importance NOT being seen as gruff, robotic and un-human. It’s more impactful to be personal, trust-worthy and human.

Finding your brand voice is making the definitive statement about who your brand is, and who it is not. And it is also proof that the brand really “gets” its target audience. That it doesn’t wait to speak to its market through focus groups and feedback forms. It also lives in the world that its target audience inhabits.

A brand with a clear voice manages to have enviable shorthand with its core market. Sometimes it leads the tribe, sometimes it is just one of the tribe, but whatever its position, it is identifiable, tangible and ultimately very human.

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According to a pioneer in the world of marketing, Louis Cheskin, we cannot help
but be influenced by the packaging of a product. To us, as consumers, when we
buy a product, we buy the packaging and the product. Coke from no-name can
will taste inferior to us than Coke in a Coca-Cola can. Cheskin called this
“sensation transference”. What we feel about the package of a product
can influence how we feel about the product itself.

Back in the 1940’s, Cheskin packaged margarine in a foil wrapper
and asked the manufacturer to change its color from the de facto white color to a rich yellow. By making
these changes, Cheskin managed to equate margarine to the aesthetic qualities
of butter (considered a superior product than margarine). Sales of margarine
went up dramatically.

So what can we learn from Cheskin’s principle of ’sensation transference’? That
it matters how we package things. We start to experience the taste of an Oreo
cookie even before we put the cookie in our mouth. From the color of the
outer package to the crackling of the plastic inside, the cookie is more
than flour and sugar and a few thousand chemicals. It is the sum total of the
entire experience, from the product display in the grocery store, the package
and it’s contents. And that is what good brands have always known. Countless people have
talked about helping Jacob Nielsen, usability professional, re-design his
website, to help him take advantage of this sensation transference. Good
content inside a good looking container, may be more palatable than the existing
pale yellow and blue laundry list of links.

So what we can learn from sensation transference today? Well, for one, let’s focus on how we package our brand. Let’s take a good hard look at
our brand package and figure out if any of the below is true for it:

1. Our logo is not as important as we think. Yes, you heard correctly. Your logo is really not
   that important. Once you have a professionally designed logo in your hands,
   it’s not the logo but what you do with it that matters. Unless you are a
   multi-national corporation that needs to be recognized across language and
   cultures, and are willing to spend millions of dollars to protect your
   properties, your logo is only one part of your visual language. You will want
   to spend equal amounts of time and money, to build your messaging and product
   statements. Can you guess which company’s website this is? You probably can,
   even though there is no mention of their products, and all evidence of their
   logo and navigation has been removed. The reason for that is that while this company recognizes that their logo is important, they are also equally concerned with all other aspects of their visual communication to you, the end-user. They ensure that their products, website and all marketing material speak the same language. (Oh, just in case, the company is Apple)
2. We are not consistent enough. To understand the importance of
   consistency, imagine a happy meal without a toy. Or a visit to Disneyland
   without seeing those mouse ears. Or the absence of Tony the Tiger on the
   Frosted Flakes cereal box. Packaging your brand means to have a shorthand with
   your audience. They need to know what you stand for. Today and tomorrow. Both
   physically and conceptually. Cool is to Apple what Speed is to Fedex. Or what
   discounts are to Wal-Mart. From your brochures to your office carpet, consider
   what your choices are saying about what your brand stands for.
3. We are not different enough. Might seem like a paradox when discussing
   consistency, but to be different is to not be like your competition. Pierre Bourdieu,
   a French psychologist said, “A choice of brand is a clear statement of
   what you are NOT!” Show your audience how you are different. What do you
   stand for, that your competition does not? To be a strong player in the market
   you need to be known for one thing. Make sure you shout out this difference
   from the roof tops (roof tops could equal home page, splash screen, brochures
   etc). Your difference can actually be a potential weakness turned upside down.
   For example: some people prefer dealing with small, growing companies rather
   than the big corporate man. Ben & Jerry’s capitalized on that. Maybe your
   difference is not in the final product but in your production process? Or in
   your values and community involvement? Vancity made a name for themselves doing
   just that. The only way you are going to find out what you do differently than
   your competition, is to study your competition and the existing marketplace—know
   them inside out and react with courage. “Against Animal Testing” was more than
   just a slogan, it was a way of doing business that brought the Body Shop much
   success and encouraged the entire cosmetics industry to examine their
   practices.

So in the end, to understand the importance of branding is to understand the power of packaging. We are human and can’t help but be influenced by what we see. So make sure that your outsides are telling the correct story about your insides!

Big ups to two books "Blink : The Power of Thinking Without Thinking" and "Brand Sense". Both are seemingly contradictory. The first places emphasis on how we can go wrong when asked to evaluate our first impressions, and the second bases research on asking people about their first impressions. However, both books helped me write this article.