My Mindless Ramblings

Branding is something I've always been quiet interested in, and studied it a lot during my university degree and outside of education in my personal time. Coffee is also another one of my passions! This is probably why i was so surprised by Starbucks latest move.

Starbucks are running a trial scheme of coffee shops which are completely unbranded. Apparently these shops will look like an ordinary local coffee shop, host things like poetry, open mic and music events. Do all the things you would expect from a small local coffee shop, but at the same time be a Starbucks in disguise.


Conventional marketing tells us, build up a brand name to build up customer perceptions of security, quality, familiarity. You want your customer to not only be able to walk into any one of your stores and feel at home, but at the same time get such a preference for your products that they do not buy customer alternatives. In that respect Starbucks have done amazingly well, their name, their brand has reached iconic status and become synonymous with coffee

This is the first time personally i've heard of a company deliberately unbranding themselves. Is this a case of a brand backfiring, not because of low quality or service but just because they have become so big? I have on many occasions complained about the center of Birmingham having so many Starbucks, with some practically being on the opposite corner from each other. I remember reading that this was part of Starbucks original market entry strategy, that even if one branch was in direct competition with another, the loss was acceptable for the increase in brand awareness.



This is now a strategy which is no longer productive. With the brand being so big, the stores in competition with each other are no longer required. Its probably more cost effective to shut one of the branches and focus on the other. That coupled with the recently losses Starbucks have taken in the financial crisis is probably the reason for the store closures over the past year.

At the same time customers are sick of seeing a Starbucks on every corner, sick of seeing their local coffee shop close down because of the Starbucks down the street. We are once again entering a market without choice or variation, eventually all the colour and fun drains away and you find yourself realising that this years summer Frappachino is just the same as ever other years with a little twist.

And so they turn to radical measures, will it work? I don't know, conventional marketing is useless to predict this in my opinion. Could the Starbucks brand possibly be any bigger in the US and EU than it currently is? That have the kind of money to back this scheme, isn't it likely that the biggest competition to these unbranded coffee houses could be actual Starbucks branches?

But it leads me to one interesting question. Does coffee need branding? These days i can walk into a coffee house pretty much anywhere in the world and know i will probably be able to get a Cappuccino, Latte, Espresso or maybe even an Americano. So the question is why do i go to Starbucks?

For a little over 4 years i've been an addict, and during the hight of my addiction i was 'using' everyday, sometime for hours on end. But my addiction isn't drugs, cigarettes or alcohol, i am addicted to God.... That is of course a lie, my addiction is much more socially acceptable. Like 11 million other people i am addicted to World of Warcraft.

Over the last 4 years i have clocked over 8643 hours of gameplay (thats 360 in days), i have played in the top 0.05% of players in the world. I have met new people from all over and played with them. Despite all the fun i've had playing World of Warcraft as of this week i have quit. Mainly due to a mixture of boredom and excessive amounts of work I decided now was a good time. I have no regrets when looking back on my time spent playing, and i have no regrets in leaving.

But it does make me wonder what i could have achieved if i had spent those hours on something else... probably quite a bit. So all thats left to do now is say farewell to Tyia my beloved Gnome Warlock, and get on with my life.



Rest in peace little one.

So, on my seemingly endless travels all in the name of business I found myself sitting in a Starbucks and reading a copy of the motorcycle diaries. Quite a normal place to find oneself (unless you live in a remote wasteland of a country without Starbucks of course, but thats another whine...)

Like i usually do, i was taking time between chapters to look around and just watch the people around me. I found myself thinking 'God school children in England really dress like sluts.. if i was a parent i wouldn't let my clearly underage child go to school in a skirt which doesn't even cover her bum when she walks'. But thats when it really hit me, the entire place was full of school children..

I was reading up some statistics and some scientists believe that between 80-90% of the population are addicted to caffeine, i couldn't help but wonder if these children are too? They probably get a coffee on the way to school and meet up with their friends and have one on the way home. I find the whole thing quite worrying. We have restrictions on the age from which you can start smoking, drinking alcohol or having sex but we are perfectly happy to let our children ritually consume copious amounts of caffeine a day?



The whole thing irked me slightly, my mother used to consume so much caffeine during a working day that before she even turned 45 she had an irregular heartbeat. She was told to not drink caffeine again and has to take medication to attempt to stabilise the rhythm of her heart. Now she is an from the generation before me, she probably didn't start drinking caffeine until she started working at 20+. I looked around the café and some of the children there probably had a 10-15 year head-start on my mother, God knows what its doing to their less than stable metabolism...

Now, i'm not saying there should be age restrictions on caffeine, maybe society already has too many rules and restrictions. I just think that its something we should pay attention to, i can tell what caffeine does to my body just from taking a few days without drinking it. What worries me the most is that i can notice this effect and i'm a 24 year old fully matured human being, not a 12 year old school child.

Once again we find ourselves approaching a American election and once again i find myself asking the same question:

How can the democrats lose?

I have learnt one valuable lessons from the past two elections; Europe is not America, and the European media paints an incredibly one colour opinion of the America elections and that colour is blue.

Regardless of that, the democrats lost the last two elections and could easily lose this one too. Is the US ready for Obama? I certainly hope it is. I know I will be staying up late to watch this election unfold.

I'm a big believer that if you prepare too much for something, it becomes boring.

Thats why all i know about my holiday is the where, the when, the who, the how, the what.. thats all completely unplanned, it should make for a nice adventure Of course i'm not really risk that much, just putting a lot of faith in my friends, my family and the british transport network.

This is mostly a joining post, marking the departure from the mindless entries i've been writing recently and hopefully onto something more meaningful. I have a lot of stuff I want to write about, just finding the time I actually want to write it which is the problem.