Brand a Coffee Shop; Brand an Experience Part 2

Part 2: Part 2 of this article takes a look at the branding campaigns of larger chain stores, one regional and one national. As retail chains act to provide a shared experience among outlets, the brand becomes a central design theme for the Denver-based Peaberry Coffee and the internationally renowned Starbucks.

Peaberry Coffee: Not Quite a Venti, but More than a Single Shot

Started in Denver back in 1990, Peaberry Coffee seeks to give the best coffee experience, as evidenced by their namesake. A peaberry is a small coffee bean that makes up a minuscule part of the overall coffee crop and has only one part, whereas most coffeebeans have two halves within one cherry, yet the oval-shaped bean is said to be the most flavorful. Peaberries are officially imperfections in the crop, but because of their rarity and taste, they are considered by some to be the caviar of coffee. In order to further educate about coffee production and the subsequent tastebud impact, the Peaberry Coffee Profile System gives customers a way to discern between different coffee types by trying them. This technique is also employed by the older and more venerable Peet’s Coffee & Tea, and even by Starbucks around the world. Giving customers a way to understand coffee is a good method in building brand loyalty, and keeps would-be connoisseurs coming back for more.

And also like Starbucks, Peaberry Coffee serves a variety of coffee drinks, including the sweet blended kind. The similarities don’t stop there, however, as the Peaberry Coffee experience continues to take a cue from Starbucks’ success. The Peaberry Coffee store in Boulder on Arapahoe Road actually looks a lot like a Starbucks. Everything from the all-caps logo font to the similar interior colors that warm the shop in hues of pine, copper brown, and black highlights. Black menus with white text remind the customer of something they’ve seen before, but can’t remember exactly. There are logos on clear cups for cold drinks, and brand-designed brown paper cups for hot watch-out-for-a-lawsuit beverages. Even the clientele is eerily similar, as laptops and velour pants occupy cosy spots in the shop.

The main difference between Starbucks and Peaberry is something the customer should be aware of: as a coffee retail business with all its outlets in Colorado, Peaberry Coffee is more likely to invest in the local economy. And the “Bears of Colorado” frozen drink line should help to enunciate Peaberry’s impact on the community, as part of the branding campaign.

The Peaberry Coffee web site gives a fair amount of information including store locations, a way to fill up your coffee card, the history of the company, and an online store to purchase beans within the Profile System. Layout of text on this site is a bit cumbersome, with varying sizes and colors of Times New Roman used, and there are awkward areas of resizable content. The warm, rich browns of the color scheme keep up with the rest of the branding though, and the logo is consistent with the those on Peaberry Coffee storefronts, merchandise and coffee cups. Some of the flash animations seem to have a different fonting from the logo, navigation, and content text. Overall, the web site provides competition for other local coffee shops that lack a web presence, but could take another cue from other coffee giants in providing quality design and organization.

Peaberry Coffee remains a favorite among residents of Colorado and is an effective regional alternative to Starbucks, giving variety where it is needed. Without the events of local coffee shops, like music and poetry, it doesn’t infringe too much on the turf of shops like Trident and The Laughing Goat (see Part 1). And by utilizing some of the successful strategies of bigger coffee companies, Peaberry’s branding is familiar and uniform.

Starbucks: Famous for Being Big, Successful through Branding

The Starbucks branding campaign is so successful, that I likely don’t need to show a picture of the logo, a piece of their merchandise, or a shot of their store front for you to think of the green, white, and black icon of topic. The mermaid, or melusine since she has two tails, has traveled all over the world as the benevolent face of quick, friendly, smoke-free American coffee shops. In Boulder, the recognizable symbol has not been without its perils, as the sign in front of the 17th Street and Broadway location was home to a bit of street art this past winter. One of Shepard Fairey’s “Andre the Giant” faces (part of the OBEY Giant campaign) was pasted over that of the smiling sea creature. As testament to how ingrained the green mermaid emblem is in our culture, the “modified” signage remained undetected for several days.

These days, the unofficial logo scraped off, Starbucks on Broadway hums along, often to the tune of their “Hear Music” retail concept. The endeavor includes the music heard in the stores, an XM radio channel, and a line of albums you can buy right in the store, some which are Starbucks exclusives. The sound of Starbucks is something that you can take home and enjoy, along with their line of Starbucks merchandise. Starbucks sells a variety of coffee beans, drinks, and pastries in their stores, but they also offer many kinds of travel cups, a few espresso machines for home use, and many small impulse items, all emblazoned with the logo and branding design. What’s great about this method of brand recognition is that it places fun, desirable items at home, in your office, and they make convenient gifts for all occasions. The Starbucks experience isn’t just something you can immerse yourself in when you’re at one of their six thousand locations, it is something you can have at home when you’re still in your PJs.

On the Starbucks web site, you can look up the nutritional information for their products, learn about coffee history, refuel your Starbucks Card, order gifts of Starbucks for your business partners, and read responses to Starbucks rumors. As you can imagine, there is a lot of content — a lot of marketing and branding translated into web page design, layout, and organization. For each of the six main pieces of navigation, a color and a graphical icon is given, making each section unique and at the same time giving the user a clear indication of where they are. This is a well-designed web site with a consistent look and feel that creates interest through a muted, but strong color palette. Another success of their web site is the use of photorealistic elements such as the homepage background that resembles fine ribbed paper, images on every page for illustration, and the top left portraits in black and white proclaiming what Starbucks is all about. The only curiosity of www.starbucks.com is the lack of an address bar icon. Both the Starbucks Store and the Hear Music web sites use the round green logo that is so accommodating for their bookmarkable icon, but the main web site is bereft of what is usually a standard for corporate websites.

Young urban professionals, known to frequent Starbucks, are the main demographic for Starbuck’s hip (I mean, check out that appealing color scheme!), environmentally conscious (what with Fair Trade and Organic coffee among the daily offerings), and socially responsible (benefits and stock options for “partners” working twenty hours a week) branding campaign. By making their views known, the largest multinational coffee shop in the world works to sustain a recognizable image and experience to customers everywhere.

Branding with Success: Featuring the Coffee Shop Archetype

The advancements Starbucks has made in the field of coffee have become the well-known tried-and-true form of chain coffee shops — from the cup design to the furniture layout to the branding colors. They expanded a method that worked in Seattle, trimmed it down, cleaned it up, and made it appealing in cities around the world. Pretty soon, Starbucks was making it big in Seoul, Korea, and holding it down with flying dark green and white colors at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate. Back home in America, people were just learning the joys of coffee enthusiasm, like the difference between a Café Latte and a Café Au Lait, thanks to the efforts of stores like Starbucks and Peaberry Coffee. For the U.S., it was a new age in coffee consumption as Joe Everyman and Nancy Somebody drank coffee that did not resemble anything from a dry, round can.

In terms of the uniform branding identity that marked the wild chain-store successes of the 1990s, some of that rich, unruly experience that accompanied local coffee shops (in American towns large and urbane enough to support them) since days gone by was obscured. Now that the market has stabilized somewhat again, with five Starbucks locations near you and two on every street corner, local shops continue to shine, providing an experience as singular as their location. As a coffee consumer, you have the option of visiting a successful (and that was well-earned), consistent (to the point of branding every sellable item in the store, including books and CDs), multi-location coffee joint, or you can search out a more rare experience for the iced mocha that best suits your tastes. Either way, you are buying the drink — which comes in a cup that is a part of an overall branding endeavor. The storefront, the featured items, and the employee uniform are all a part of an environment that the coffee shop owners chose (or had their marketing department whip up for them) and are all part of a particular brand. You could say, “I’d like some good branding with that wet, nonfat, double shot cappucino. And could you make that to go, please?”