Daily Nonsense

Starbucks Redux…

On the 3rd of March I posted an article about Starbucks and the loss of corporate vision which has reduced the Starbucks experience to something akin of getting a cup of bean at a fast food restaurant. Time Magazine on-line put their own spin on the story with a couple of eye-opening thoughts:

You can’t wake up and smell the coffee at Starbucks. That’s the lament of Howard Schultz, the founder and chairman of the ubiquitous java chain, in an internal memo that recently became external. In this wistful missive, Schultz fretted that, because coffee is delivered in flavor-locked packaging, the atmosphere had changed, the romance evaporated; the Starbucks “experience” of baristas grinding beans, pulling expresso shots and hand-crafting beverages had been automated away by machines that can knock out an expresso with the press of a button.If I may be so bold, Howard, smelling the coffee isn’t the problem — it’s getting to it. In the ‘Bucks nearest my office, I’d venture that two out of five days I don’t have the 15 minutes to wait to purchase a simple cup of black coffee. Just coffee. No milk, no sugar, no syrup, no fooling. No way.

It’s not the atmosphere, Howard. It’s your incompetence. Or at least that of the executives who work for you at your way too laid-back HQ. You’re talking atmosphere when you should be talking about front-end operations. Instead, in my Starbucks we have the morning chaos, the lines stretching all the way to the ludicrously heavy doors, a drill duplicated at the coffee hour of 4 p.m., where they’ve mastered the art of have exactly one less person on hand than needed. Then again, I can’t blame the local manager for this parsimony, since she hardly has any room for more people. The place is too cluttered up with displays of coffeemakers, mugs, CDs, books and that other crap you can’t sell.

Read the full story here!

[Thanks, Time]

Techdirt had an article on Mar 15th regarding the blow-back that Viacom is going to suffer due to the take-down order presented to Google/YouTube because of the “more than 160,000″ copyrighted clips that the USERS had posed on YouTube.com.

What struck me most about this article is actually the last sentence:

“It’s amusing (but not surprising) that Viacom can claim that its copyrights are so important while ignoring the rights of others.“

We’ve reached a point in our legislative process when the mega companies, be they Viacom or one of the cell companies, feel comfortable enough about the sanctity and legality of their rights to run roughshod over everyone else’s. Viacom just doesn’t care that they were the catalyst for abusing the same laws they themselves were trying to get enforced. What a bunch of dinks….

from the our-lovely-legal-system-at-work deptWhile Viacom is busy basking in the glow of its pointless lawsuit against YouTube, its lawyers may be busy on a separate, but related front. Back when the company demanded Google take down certain clips, among the takedown notices were a fair number of videos that the company had no rights over — which of course were still taken down. It’s important to note, however, that when you file a DMCA take-down notice, part of that claim is that you insist you own the rights to that content. It appears that at least some of those who were the victims of this collateral damage are now turning around and suing Viacom for taking their content off-line with bogus DMCA claims. Viacom is trying to brush off these claims by suggesting it’s no big deal that a few legitimate videos were taken down, since it was in the process of taking down so many actual infringing videos. Of course, that’s small comfort to the people who actually wanted their videos on YouTube. It’s amusing (but not surprising) that Viacom can claim that its copyrights are so important while ignoring the rights of others.

[Thanks, Techdirt]

Getting Harder and Harder to Post

It’s been tough finding time to sit in front of a computer for a little ‘me’ time. I’ve been working full time and with me being right in the middle of the learning curve half a day can pass in what seems like the blink of an eye. I’m sure that as I get better and more efficient at my job I’ll free up some time to post.

Starbucks Smells the Death of Its Brand Experience
CEO Confronts Missing Aroma of Fresh-Roasted Coffee

Wow, this is a great article. It really brings home that there is more than just one thing, a sign for instance, that are involved in branding. Starbucks had branded itself with a smell as well as a little green sign. Now that’s missing from their stores and people are noticing. Read the text for more!

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — What does your Starbucks smell like? Probably not fresh-roasted coffee, one of the many things

that has the chain’s boss worried his all-powerful brand is getting cold.

Internal memo
Last week, the blog Starbucks Gossip turned up a memo from Howard Schultz in which the chairman criticized a number of decisions that “have led to the watering down of the Starbucks experience and what some might call the commoditization of our brand.” Mr. Schultz, who doled out some blame to himself, pointed in particular to the disappearance of the in-store coffee scent and the cookie-cutter feel of the stores.

It’s a major epiphany for a brand that’s been one of the marketing world’s premiere case studies on how a commodity can be transformed into a premium-priced object of desire, or habit, by creating a comfortable spot in which to buy and consume it — that third place that’s neither home nor work. Starbucks’ brisk growth — stores now number more than 13,000, and the company wants to get to 40,000 — raises the question of whether it’s possible to scale the kind of experience that made Starbucks what it is without losing the flavor.

In-store coffee grinding eliminated
In the memo, Mr. Schultz blamed automatic espresso machines that don’t require baristas to pull shots and that prevent customers from seeing drinks being made. He blamed packaging, chosen because of the need to distribute coffee to every North American city, that locked in flavor and eliminated the need to grind the coffee in-store. “We achieved fresh-roasted bagged coffee, but at what cost?” And he blamed uniform store design, financially efficient but suggestive of a “chain of stores vs. the warm feeling of a neighborhood store.”

As it’s grown, Starbucks has worked to keep consumers interested, though many innovations have taken it far from java. WiFi and CD racks have been added in recent years, and the menu has been expanded to include breakfast sandwiches. Last year, Starbucks got into the entertainment business with the release of the film “Akeelah and the Bee,” and it’s expected to announce another book or movie project early this year.

Robert Passikoff, founder-president of the consultancy Brand Keys, said Mr. Schultz’s concerns are legitimate. “They took their eye off the brand,” he said. In Brand Keys’ annual study of customer loyalty, Starbucks was knocked out of first place in the coffee-and-doughnuts category by Dunkin’ Donuts, the first time in five years Starbucks didn’t dominate.

‘Lost its differentiation’
“You probably wouldn’t leave a Starbucks dissatisfied,” he said, “but satisfaction is just the price of entry. It has lost its differentiation, its crispness of experience.”

The Feb. 14 memo, which the company confirmed as authentic, “is a reflection of the passion and commitment Starbucks has to maintaining the authenticity of the Starbucks experience while we continue to grow,” a spokeswoman said. It didn’t suggest a specific course of action; rather, Mr. Schultz, a Brooklyn-born, rags-to-riches story, asked CEO Jim Donald and top managers to “get back to the core.”

He described the situation as “self-induced” but nevertheless one that’s led to competition from fast-food companies and mom-and-pop operators. These rivals “position themselves in a way that creates awareness, trial and loyalty of people who previously have been Starbucks customers. This must be eradicated.”

“We do not embrace the status quo and constantly push for reinvention,” the spokeswoman said. “This is a consistent, longstanding business philosophy to ensure we provide our customers the uplifting experience they have come to expect.”

Good luck to Howard and his boys on that. I actually have never found a coffee joint to be an uplifting experience…..

Monster.Com E-mail Virus

This morning I received a horrible email purporting to be from Monster.com. You know them, the resume site that helps join up jobs with workers. The start of it is posted here:

So, running my cursor across the links I found three links to monster.com and one to http://khbdqnnkrgrl.com/ (Which is actually hosted by Yahoo Small Business!)

Being curious and working from the computer outside my DMZ I went ahead and clicked on it.

The aVast! On-Access Scanner caught the virus attempt and stopped the download of the trojan. But of course I worry about those folk who get this and don’t have a good virus scanner in place.

Next I tried to send a report of this to Monster. Sounds like the neighborly thing to do, don’t you think?

Here is the web page at monster where I’ve entered my info and the ‘text’ of the email. There are no live links in this, OK? Just the text.

When I hit the send button I get this:

Now, on that reporting page there are three options, the e-mail, a live chat with a monster rep and an 800 number. Shame that because I’m feeling anti-social monster ain’t going to get notified by me about this one………