Howard Schultz, the owner of Starbucks has a story worth telling. He is a master at what he does and he brought it several key concepts to the marketing world.
He figured out that by providing speciality coffee, he could charge the customers a premium and change the attitude of traditional coffee which was considered “cuppa Joe” , thus bringing in the concept of customer engagement . Unlike the other companies running during the 1990, he outwardly rejected the franchising model and decided to spend the profits and marketing resources on its stores, employees and thereby improving the customer experience.
This lead to word of mouth publicity of Starbucks and created a more powerful brand which has dominated the coffee business ever since its launch. The customers promoted the brand free of cost through word of mouth and the there is a sense of customer ownership of the brand more powerful than any other brand.
There are examples of companies where logo change did not work – Gap who changed its logo had to revert back to its original logo within a week after massive criticism on twitter and Facebook. So much so, the company even tried a failed attempt to crowd source the new design to the customers who were annoyed by Gap’s initiative to change the logo.
How the customer would be associated with the new logo is still to be seen.
