Brand Building - How the Little Things Add Up.

I confess.  I'm pretty much a Starbucks junky.  

It's hard for me to walk past one without wanting to go in and get a fix.  Partly, it's the coffee.  But a lot of the explanation for why I'm addicted to Starbucks is that I admire the way they've built their brand and I love to look for the new little things that they keep adding to the in-store experience.  Over the years, Starbucks has carefully and intelligently cultivated their brand and invested in it and built it one brick at a time.  It's now one of the most formidable and valuable brands on the planet.  Marketeers can all learn from observing Starbucks and watching not only what they do but how they do it.

Starbucks is a great real world example of "Purple Cow" thinking (a topic of an earlier Marketing Sanity blog posting).  "The Starbucks Experience:  5 Principles for Turning Ordinary into Extraordinary"  is a good book that outlines the guiding principles of the Starbucks brand.  The principles are:

1. Make It Your Own:  Are you old enough to remember when Maxwell House and Folger's owned the coffee business?  Starbucks re-invented it and has never looked back.
2. Everything Matters:  More on this principle in a minute.
3. Surprise and Delight:  Exceeding expectations.  It gets harder and harder to do, but somehow Starbucks keeps managing.
4. Embrace Resistance:  Listen and learn from the anti-Starbucks people.
5. Leave Your Mark:  Be a great corporate citizen.  Give back.  Care. 

Two recent developments at Starbucks have really caught my attention and both are great examples of both "Everything Matters" and "Surprise and Delight."  

The first and biggest is their strategic alliance with Apple and iTunes.  Every week at Starbucks you can collect a "Pick of the Week" card good for a free download of a song by a featured artist.  That's a $.99 value.  How cool is that?  Soon, you'll be able to do a one click download in the store onto your iPhone or iPod.  Hear something you like while you're enjoying your mocha?  Instant gratification.  Download it then and there.  This alliance is an obvious win-win for both companies on many levels.  It is definitely delighting in my book as a customer of both brands.

The second example is smaller but also surprising and delightful.  Recently, Starbucks has started a partnership with "Good" and begun distributing a weekly "Good Sheet".  Each weekly sheet is sponsored (so the cost to Starbucks is probably close to nil) and each features intelligent information about a thought provoking important issue of the day.  Just the thing to make me and a friend spend an extra few minutes in the store looking it over, discussing the issue and maybe ordering that second latte.  

These two new additions to the Starbucks brand are polar opposites from a technology standpoint:  one is digital and one is newsprint.  Yet they  both enhance the Starbucks brand and the in-store experience.  

As you're taxed with building your brand, in addition to all the big "important" things like ads and packaging and PR, think about all the little things you can do to surprise and delight your customers.  Then do them.  Commit to them.  Add them to your brand's experience.  Collectively, they will turn your brand into something unique and wonderful and very very valuable.