Prada and Starbucks: the non-place of retail.

In his eponymous essay and book Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (1995) French anthropologist Marc Auge coined the phrase "non-place" to refer to places of transience that do not hold enough significance to be regarded as "places."

In Auge's original concept non-places were those spaces you typically encounter when travelling such as airports, bus terminals, hotels, shopping centres and supermarkets and which you often only remember in very generic terms.

But the concept of non-place is now increasingly engulfing many more places as brand owners and their brands struggle with brand differentiation and experience.

I was recently struck by the comment in a recent review of Taylor Clark's Starbucked: a Double Tall Tale of Caffeine, Commerce and Culture, where the enclaves of Starbucks were described as "non-place" and could just as easily be in "Manchester, Mumbai or Montreal" given the scale of its globalisation.

The two key issues non-place raises is: does globalisation make it possible for ANY brands to create real and unique spaces? do the elements of branding actually work against the development of these kinds of spaces and experiences?

In the first instance, globalisation is designed to bring about both ubiquity and consistency in the performance of the brand and in the consistency of experience. For retail brands there should be little difference between your experience of your brand in one country versus another. This is best demonstrated by luxury brand, Prada.

Given the brand strength of their various marks and portfolios, luxury retailers rely particularly on the elements of place to support their brand positioning. Location, store fit out, visual merchandising, service and stock are all shared elements. In Los Angeles, the Rem Koolhaus Prada designed store might look like a garage - it has no fascia and unlike most stores on Rodeo Drive, is open to all. Despite Koolhaus' experiments with reversing a traditional store layout (the stairs face backwards and are used as more of a display area, the overall design, layout and availability and display of product still remain essentially consistent with the Prada brand identity and system.

While Koolhaus tries to subvert our notions of a retail space, I felt it was as much a a non-place as a Gap or a Starbucks, because my experience was essentially the same as any other Prada store I had been in from Rome to Sydney. As Auge puts it Prada presents "the clean, cold lines of non-place" and in what he describes as the "supermodern".

Auge describes a place "as relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place". In simple terms, Prada's place branding is so concerned with the assertion of its own identity everything else seems opaque.

This failure supports the second issue, if branding is designed to contribute to the creation of meaning, why in the same instant does it also create non-identity and non-space and perhaps the answer lies in the non-critical application of branding.

Branding works best if it can create, manifest and control the experience of identity. However, the application of logos, design systems, visual positioning, tone of voice which all in their own way produce brand and product expression and convey core messages and meaning, also work best in an environment that can be ordered. This is the purpose of branding, to create that order through a shared and understood experience.

If we take Starbucks as an example, it is fairly easy to see how Auge's non-place can be applied and how branding works against the brand. Firstly, the stores have been designed against a specific set of criteria with user experience mapped through identified touch points. These touch points, whether they are transactional (lining up at the counter order and pickup the coffee) or visual (the logo) are part of a series of cues for messaging the brand, and provide an incentive to buy and consume product.

Secondly, because customer experience is so managed within the store to maximise sales, the brand is only ever going can only deliver a ubiquitous experience. It is as
Starbucks chairman Howard Schultz said, the brand has last lost its soul (see DIFFUSIONblog 3/5/07) If as Auge claims place is "relational, historical and concerned with identity" then Starbucks branding is never going to deliver anything but a partial sense of this.

In an internal memo published last year Shultz describes "the commoditization of the Starbucks experience", he laments the the loss of "the romance and theatre" of the traditional Italian espresso machines, which have been replaced by "cooking cutter" formats and automatic machines. And it is is this sense of place created by the "romance and theatre of the machines", which is what I think is part of this non-replicable brand experience. They are intrinsically linked to the European cafe experience, which tends to be seen as non-commodified, unique and very very much about Auge's idea of "place", the Italian lifestyle.

So what can retail brands do? Auge describes the place and non-place as "polarities" and with the latter never fully resolved and this is where I think retailers need to address. If we are all supermoderns, wondering from place to non-place as we traverse the globe and even our own countries in the search for authentic experience, we need to start to encounter retail experiences which relate to a sense of place, are embedded in historical context and contribute to the creation of personal identity. The desire for a Prada suit might deliver some aspects of this but the store as the mechanism of experience is flawed. Branding needs to be far more self critical and ready to fall outside systems and formats. Its why love boutiques and flea markets. They are unordered, lack any brand homology and are always different.

Is Starbucks on the nose?

According to a weekend report in the Washington Post, Starbucks Chairman Howard Schultz believes his stores have lost their soul. Or is he really talking about their brand essence? (see our blog 20 October 2005 The defining essence. Getting a handle on Oroton)

Quoting a leaked internal memo to his CEO and other executives, the Post reported that Schultz believes his 13,000 stores worldwide stores no longer even smell like coffee because of "flavor locked packaging".

But now the chairman of the world's leading coffee retailer seems to be onto something that should have occurred to him long ago, describing how "some people even call our stores sterile, cookie cutter." In the 14 February memo entitled "The Commoditization of the Starbucks experience", Schultz laments the the loss of "the romance and theatre" of the traditional Italian espresso machines, which have been replaced by automatic machines (in this Starbucks are not alone). Schultz wrote that the new efficient machines now commonly used in the stores block customers from watching as coffee is made and sharing what he called an "intimate experience with the barista." He obviously hasn't really visited a store recently if he thinks his staff can really be described as "baristas", when anyone who has worked their knows that a real barista does not simply press a button.

But to give Schultz his due, he is very aware of the threat from competitors who have created a more authentic coffee experience (anyone who's every bought the freshly grounf from Toby's Coffee in Sydney's Wooloomooloo would know this). Though likening them to pests who need to be "eradicated" seems to a touch colourful. More importantly, Schultz doesn't really suggest any alternatives given the scale and scope of the problme.

Here at DIFFUSION, we think it might be a good idea if the Starbucks's chairman think more carefully about how the stores could better reflect their local communities, how they might build a genuine rather than simply a differentiated brand experience and not rely solely on technologies and store layouts to maximise ROI. After all they have had to have been doing something right building the brand for the past 20 years, they must have learnt something.

A full transcript of the memo can be found at Starbucks Gossip http://starbucksgossip.typepad.com/_/2007/02/starbucks_chair_2.html
It reads:

From: Howard Schultz
Sent: Wednesday, February 14, 2007 10:39 AM Pacific Standard Time
To: Jim Donald
Cc: Anne Saunders; Dave Pace; Dorothy Kim; Gerry Lopez; Jim Alling; Ken Lombard; Martin Coles; Michael Casey; Michelle Gass; Paula Boggs; Sandra Taylor

Subject: The Commoditization of the Starbucks Experience

As you prepare for the FY 08 strategic planning process, I want to share some of my thoughts with you.

Over the past ten years, in order to achieve the growth, development, and scale necessary to go from less than 1,000 stores to 13,000 stores and beyond, we have had to make a series of decisions that, in retrospect, have lead to the watering down of the Starbucks experience, and, what some might call the commoditization of our brand.

Many of these decisions were probably right at the time, and on their own merit would not have created the dilution of the experience; but in this case, the sum is much greater and, unfortunately, much more damaging than the individual pieces. For example, when we went to automatic espresso machines, we solved a major problem in terms of speed of service and efficiency. At the same time, we overlooked the fact that we would remove much of the romance and theatre that was in play with the use of the La Marzocca machines. This specific decision became even more damaging when the height of the machines, which are now in thousands of stores, blocked the visual sight line the customer previously had to watch the drink being made, and for the intimate experience with the barista. This, coupled with the need for fresh roasted coffee in every North America city and every international market, moved us toward the decision and the need for flavor locked packaging. Again, the right decision at the right time, and once again I believe we overlooked the cause and the affect of flavor lock in our stores. We achieved fresh roasted bagged coffee, but at what cost? The loss of aroma -- perhaps the most powerful non-verbal signal we had in our stores; the loss of our people scooping fresh coffee from the bins and grinding it fresh in front of the customer, and once again stripping the store of tradition and our heritage? Then we moved to store design. Clearly we have had to streamline store design to gain efficiencies of scale and to make sure we had the ROI on sales to investment ratios that would satisfy the financial side of our business. However, one of the results has been stores that no longer have the soul of the past and reflect a chain of stores vs. the warm feeling of a neighborhood store. Some people even call our stores sterile, cookie cutter, no longer reflecting the passion our partners feel about our coffee. In fact, I am not sure people today even know we are roasting coffee. You certainly can't get the message from being in our stores. The merchandise, more art than science, is far removed from being the merchant that I believe we can be and certainly at a minimum should support the foundation of our coffee heritage. Some stores don't have coffee grinders, French presses from Bodum, or even coffee filters.

Now that I have provided you with a list of some of the underlying issues that I believe we need to solve, let me say at the outset that we have all been part of these decisions. I take full responsibility myself, but we desperately need to look into the mirror and realize it's time to get back to the core and make the changes necessary to evoke the heritage, the tradition, and the passion that we all have for the true Starbucks experience. While the current state of affairs for the most part is self induced, that has lead to competitors of all kinds, small and large coffee companies, fast food operators, and mom and pops, to position themselves in a way that creates awareness, trial and loyalty of people who previously have been Starbucks customers. This must be eradicated.

I have said for 20 years that our success is not an entitlement and now it's proving to be a reality. Let's be smarter about how we are spending our time, money and resources. Let's get back to the core. Push for innovation and do the things necessary to once again differentiate Starbucks from all others. We source and buy the highest quality coffee. We have built the most trusted brand in coffee in the world, and we have an enormous responsibility to both the people who have come before us and the 150,000 partners and their families who are relying on our stewardship.

Finally, I would like to acknowledge all that you do for Starbucks. Without your passion and commitment, we would not be where we are today.

Onward…

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