> BRANDED
Brian Waring, UK and Ireland marketing and category vice-president for Starbucks
E
All of Starbucks’ coffee is now 100pc Fairtade-certified
Starbucks ensures its ‘partners’ share in its success
arlier this month a new logo for Starbucks started to appear in its stores, one of the end products of the 40-year-old company’s re-evaluation of its identity. Starbucks’ famous siren now stands alone in a clean- er, more contemporary design, with the new logo showing up on cups, menu boards, napkins and exteriors as the company starts to refurbish at a rate of 100 stores a year in the UK and Ireland.
“As Starbucks was hitting 40 this year we felt it was the right
time to think about our identity,” says Brian Waring, UK and Ireland marketing and category vice-president for Starbucks. “This is the fourth evolution of our logo. The siren is very iconic and well recognised and we felt that as such it was strong enough to stand alone. “This allows the logo to appear in places other than those asso-
ciated with coffee. Our core business continues to be coffee, but increasingly other things such as tea, frappuccinos and food are becoming more significant to the business.We wanted the logo to represent a much broader range of categories.” The first Starbucks store opened in Pike Place Market in Seattle
in the US 1971. Now there are 16,858 stores worldwide, with 700 stores in the UK and 20 in Ireland, further to the company entering those markets in 1998 and 2005 respectively.
Values-driven success “The values and principles of Starbucks today are exactly the same as when the company was founded – it is built on the belief that you can be a successful company by being a good compa- ny,” explains Waring. “This translates into the way we do business, such as our com-
mitment to sourcing coffee in an ethical, mutually beneficial way with coffee farmers. We have been working with Conservation International since 1998 and we set up our own rigorous guide- lines – Café Practices. It’s not just about the price we pay for cof- fee, but how we are treating the environment; access to credit for farmers and investing in local communities.” Starbucks recently marked its one-year anniversary of 100pc of
its espresso being Fairtrade-certified (every cappuccino, latte and americano), with 80 million Fairtrade coffee cups served a year in the UK and Ireland. Every Starbucks around the world has the aim of investing in
local community projects. For example, in Dublin the brand has developed a new partnership with the Irish Youth Foundation to deliver a community programme, which enables young people to identify community needs and apply for grants and volunteer hours. An important part of the brand’s founding principles is to make
sure that employees – which it refers to as ‘partners’ – share in its success through bonuses, stock, skills and qualifications. “In December, all partners, including those working part-time, in
the UK and Ireland, received a one-off bonus with a collective value of €1.6m. In January, 6,700 UK and Ireland partners received a share grant worth around £4m, which replaces our longstanding stock option scheme. Last year, Starbucks introduced free health insurance for all 200 plus partners in Ireland,” Waring points out. “The way we treat our partners creates a strong sense of loyal-
ty. The way we’ve built our brand is through our coffee houses, which fundamentally means through the connection partners have with customers on an individual basis. Our partners are the expres- sion of our brand.” On a day-to-day basis, this means Starbucks’ employees creat-
ing a good experience for each customer, for example by knowing their names and how they like their drinks. “So much of our brand has been built on our stores that we are
constantly investing in design and their environment. We have a belief that we need to make sure each store is relevant to the com- munity it’s in,” continues Waring. Starbucks recently invested a considerable amount ofmoney on
its Liffey Valley store in Dublin and is continually looking at ideas for different formats of stores – in the UK, it has explored drive- through stores and motorway service, for example, and these could be concepts it will look at over time for the Irish market, according to Waring. “We introduced new types of stores in February and March in the
36 Marketing Age Volume 5 Issue 1 2011
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