Starbucks to rebrand by debranding

Erik Sine · September 18, 2009

Starbucks' managing director has a new plan to rectify the company's

mistakes. Will removing the identikit branding make you more likely to

buy their coffee?

It's hard to pinpoint exactly when Starbucks stopped being cool. When they first opened in the UK they had all the West Coast messenger bag asymmetric hair and hipster chic a cool-starved Brit could ever want. For years, coffee had meant a choice between mum's Mellow Birds and the caustic brewed filth from the salmonella-ridden vending machine in the corner of the office.

Now, suddenly, it meant being served ludicrously cool confections by cute staff with piercings and blackwork. It meant 'hanging out' for hours without being tutted at by a waitress. It meant off-site meetings and muffins and it meant sitting alone in a corner with a laptop Mac and looking like you had a blockbuster screenplay in your head rather than an impossible dream of ever getting a date.

Then it all went to hell. As the shops proliferated, their bright, studiedly informal interiors began to look like cynical clones, the staff quietly morphed from stunning resting-between-jobs actresses into stunned looking minimum-wage droids with thousand yard stares, and everything began to smell of sour milk. What had once looked like the brightest of futures began to look like McDonald's.

Well it seems that Starbucks, faced with a global financial crisis, a million cookie-cutter, flavoured-milk bars, and a customer base of retired hipsters heaving a great 'whatever' about their increasingly dreadful product, have finally caught on. Yes, the company that was never going to fall for any of that tired corporate shit, daddio, has finally twigged that they need to make their shops … less corporate.

As Phoebe would have said: "Well ... duh!"

What actually happened at Starbucks was a well-worn path for an iconoclastic, upstart, paradigm-busting 'fast' company. Like Gap, Ben and Jerry's, Whole Foods, Innocent and Snapple, what had begun as an it's-fun-to-work-here, we-all-love-what-we-do, no-suits-and-ties-for-us, hippie love-in became first financially successful and then an old-school global corporate behemoth. It seems Malcolm McClaren was right when he said "Never trust a hippie".

According to recent releases both from the Seattle Death Star and UK corporate HQ, Starbucks is going to change its image with a raft of carefully selected authenticity cues. The centrally dictated colour palette and drear interiors will be smartened up with local artefacts, community noticeboards and possibly, whisper it low, second-hand furniture.

They've already kicked off the party with a new site in Seattle branded '15th Ave. Coffee and Tea Inspired by Starbucks' which is an awful precedent for their UK initiative. What's going to happen when your local lattemonger is suddenly draped with chintz and hangs out a sign for 'The Copper Kettle, Coffee 'n' Bun Shop (inspired by Starbucks)'?

Dear God in heaven say this isn't happening. Having globally screwed the pooch by turning the coffee shop from a calm refuge to a temple of Mammon, do they really think that giving it a make-over is going to endear it to anyone? We seem to be a community of fairly confirmed Starbucks rejecters, is there any chance this move is going to drag us back?