At some point in time someone has to stand up and say "this is not what our brand is about"
10/01/09 12:18 PM Filed in: Branding
Since when is a strategic business strategy that ensures long term growth and or profitability so bad? When people on Wall Street act like they know a lot more than CEO's and when CEO's try and bend over backwards because these analysts are more important than common sense and customers.
Starbucks instant coffee is not going to save the brand, in fact it's so bad that it may actually help kill a brand that was an icon among a lot of coffee drinkers. I gave some the instant coffee to some friends and everyone to a person said "this is really really bad". When I told them it was Starbucks they didn't believe that a brand that equals great coffee could market such a bad product.
I'm sure Starbucks has done a lot of research on the new product but research doesn't mean success today. Somewhere with in the Starbucks organizations somebody should have stood up and said "this is really bad and I don't want to put our brand name on this product!" That doesn't happen enough today because people are more concerned with keeping their paychecks than doing what they believe is right. The crash of our economy was not caused by any one person but by a bunch of people who got drunk on money and didn't care who they hurt while they fed their habit.
Traditional market research is dead folks. It has been replaced with instant research on Facebook and Twitter. Paid bloggers are going to get burned when users find out that they are being bought by corporate America and Starbucks is going to get nothing back from instant coffee except a black eye.