On Starbucks, franchises, media brands and eroding trust in your brand
When is a Starbucks not a Starbucks? Apparently only when I’m in the grocery store, or a hotel or, I don’t know almost every place I ever encounter the behemoth’s logo in person.
Confused? Me too.
All I wanted was a bottle of water, a delicious slice of marble cake, and to pay for it with a Starbucks card I received as a gift.
Believe it or not, I’ve been having trouble clearing it out, due in large part to the fact that I’ve been working from home for the past six months (I DO love the Internet 😉 and also because I’m in Boston and Dunkin Donuts is still putting up a good fight.
Anyway, when I do encounter something claiming to be a Starbucks, I want to use the card. I don’t want to hear anything about “Oh, we’re a franchise and not a real Starbucks and that card doesn’t work here.”
So, they pay Starbucks to use the logo, get the merchandise delivered, yet can’t configure their registers to accept this card.
These are my encounters with the Starbucks brand, and I’m not happy about it.
The same can largely be said for media companies. I’ve worked at more than one Big Newspaper that seems to have a Kane and Abel approach to dealing with its web operation.
Corrections that only appear in the late print editions but not the Web version that more people end up reading through the course of the next Web cycle? Not the newspaper’s problem.
Invented URLs to sites on either the newspaper’s site or other sites? Who cares! You can’t click on the newspage anyway.
I could go on, but it’s too easy and depressing.
Sure none of these things will hurt the newspaper but they are examples of how users can be turned off by their experience with the company’s brand.
It’s probably a lot like being in a Starbucks with a caffene jones and a giftcard you can’t use.
TAG: wemedia
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Chad Capellman is the web producer for wemedia.com. He has served in this capacity for every We Media conference even while working for other employers that included Boston.com, Eons.com and O’Reilly Media. He has applied many of the CMS, social networking and extended reach lessons he learned from five years at the Media Center at the American Press Institute and elsewhere to client web sites. He can be found at capellman.com
As much as I hate Starbucks, I admire their business model.