Caribou takes aim at the competition -- and misses

An article in AdAge today showed Caribou Coffee's new ad, featuring overly trendy "characters" being pretentious and snobby but pining for a Caribou mocha. When asked why they don't get Caribou coffee, the male marionette says, "because we're not real", to which the female puppet asks, "Are you saying we're fake?", all a lead up to the ad's narrated tagline, "it's time to get real."

If we're talking about being real, can we also talk about reality? Perhaps I am biased because I live in an extremely caffeinated city, but mochas and lattes stopped being snobby and pretentious years ago. Look at the line at any Starbucks---it's not haute couture and hipsters, it's office drones and construction workers and high school kids. My non-scientific research indicates that there are now slightly more than 8 million Starbucks locations in the U.S., serving several kajillion "foofy" drinks every day. (My coworker jokingly dismisses them as "a milkshake company" because they sell so little coffee). Yes, self-important hipsters are a legitimate threat to our culture, but there aren't enough of them to support the megopoly that is Starbucks.

McDonald's mocked coffeehouse pretensions last year when introducing McCafe, and even then, they were out of date. (I had issues with those ads, too.) Sure, it's easy to make fun of pretentious buffoons, but the joke has to be on something that's as pretentious as the users themselves -- perhaps "organic" water or spray tans? Can we agree that the mocha has become a cross-class phenomenon, and that the way to differentiate your product is to talk about the product, not the people who do or don't consume it?

So the story goes

First, props to my brother Tim, who began telling me about two years ago, "Storytelling---that's the future of marketing." At the time, I had to take him at his word. A year later, he sent me a book called "What's Your Story?", which assured the same thing. These days, I hear it all over the marketing world, that every company needs to have a story.

Everyone likes a good story. It's human nature to root for the underdog who beats the odds, to be drawn in by the dreamer who dared. A good backstory makes supporting a product more rewarding---for instance, check out this fabulous copywriting from Word Jones, text for a Converse sneaker catalog that wraps the product tightly with youth and achievement and happiness. It immediately conjured the sensation of tightening the laces on my Chuck Ts and running as fast as my feet would carry me.

Most recently, I noticed that Seattle's Best Coffee (SBC) has decided to tell their story, penning it on the side of their coffee cups. These cups are the the most overt examples of storytelling that I have seen to date, so literary in their presentation that I expected the second cup to begin, "Chapter Two":

A Cat named Henry

In our early days, we roasted all of our coffees on Vashon Island, a half-hour ferryboat ride from Seattle. There, a large, happy calico cat named Henry used to sit and watch as we loaded and unloaded our beans – we think he loved the warm glow of the roaster. As a tribute, we named our signature espresso roast, Henry’s Blend®, after our favorite cat.

Our Name Is Our Promise

It all began in 1970 on the Seattle waterfront with a desire to create a smoother cup of coffee and an old peanut roaster. We roasted lots of coffee and finally pioneered a roasting style that used subtle temperature and timing adjustments to create our signature smoother, more flavorful coffees. It’s how we became Seattle’s Best Coffee.

These stories seem like the perfect creation myth for a cozy little coffee shop, the kind of place expatriates would reminisce about for years, a place so warm and genuine that every other coffee shop you visited for the rest of your life would be measured against Henry and the crew.

But what I really want to know is, does this story help sell SBC coffee?

I do not doubt the accuracy of the tales told on their cups, but in this case, it seems like an effort to sell the story as a replacement for reality: SBC is now a Starbucks company, so this description of a peanut-roaster origin has little resemblance to their corporate present tense. I'm not against corporate coffee, and my possession of two SBC cups indicates that I appreciate the flavor of their lattes (and the consistency of their lattes), but SBC is a long way from being a local start-up roaster like Trailhead or a neighborhood brewer like Extracto.

I can appreciate it from a marketing angle, but as a skeptical consumer, I'm not sold. I return for the flavor of the drink, not for the verbiage on the cup. For example, I find Starbucks' "The Way I See It" cups very engaging, with random opinions from random people on various topics, and I'm impressed that those cups have generated customer conversation on the web site---yet I do not drink there because I do not like the coffee, and no verbiage is going to change that. Conversely, the last incarnation of cups at Portland's now defunct Coffee People read like a poorly conceived stream of consciousness manifesto, and I was a constant customer.

It all boils down to the same age-old truth: The quality of the product matters more than the marketing. SBC tells a tidy tale, but it's the coffee that brings me back to hear the story, and not vice versa. The same applies to every story told to me across a retail counter: Good story, bad product? No sale. Good story, good product? I wonder how much of the success can be attributed to the story.

Slogans I admire in five words or less (Part 10)

Stay Close. Go Far.

I recently kvetched about ads for colleges and universities, but a recent bus ad for Washington State University Vancouver caught my eye in a positive way. The bus ad still featured a smiling face of a student, but the copy carried the ad. In fact, the copy was only that tagline: Stay close. Go far.


The attached image is a screenshot from the website, not the bus ad (I was sans camera when I saw the transit ad), and props to WSU for including, along with the pretty young student, a group of students apparently studying. (Too many college ads stop with the pretty young student. I can't recall any recently that show studying, as if that might be mistaken as work, and work doesn't sell.)

Stay close. Go far. It's clean and compelling, so quickly addressing that age-old dilemma of whether going off to school is about education or escape. Well done.

Diversity is only skin deep

You may have heard about Microsoft's Photoshop debacle in August 2009, when it was revealed that an image used by Microsoft in Poland was a doctored version of an ad used in the US, with a white man's head superimposed onto a black man's body. Once discovered, the comically amateurish edit quickly spread throughout the design community and the Internet, the differences being easy to spot. Scroll through the images on the link above for proof: The new head is lit from a completely different direction, tilts at an awkward angle, and despite the change to a new face, the color of the model's hands were never changed.

I understand that diversity is an advertising expectation these days, and that having your ads appear to represent your target audience is a wise marketing tactic. But Frankensteining lopped heads onto stranger's shoulders?

While walking in the Pearl District here in Portland today, I chanced upon a series of mini-mannequins in the Diesel display window that got me thinking of diversity in a new way. Note the racial diversity of these 18" models: white, brown and black, presumably to represent Caucasian, Hispanic (or perhaps Asian?) and Negro.


I say "presumably" because beyond the skin and hair color, there are no discernible differences between the figures. It's the marketing department's "obligatory diversity" concept brought to its ultimate end: Same washboard stomach, same glorious pompadour, same chiseled face and piercing blue eyes---the only difference between the races is the color of injection-molded plastic required to cast these little briefs-wearing he-men.

At first I laughed at the absurdity, but the more I thought about it, the more I liked Diesel's portrayals. Stock photography struggles mightily to demonstrate diversity, usually stopping just short of Native Americans in feathered headdresses mingling at an office desk with Hasidic Jews and parka-sporting Eskimos. Diesel has leap-frogged to the inevitable finish line---giving its various target demographics something they can relate to---without fabricating a back story meant to make the diversity seem coincidental. Add the improbable body shapes and natural-on-none-of-them coif and you have a series of cartoons with varied pigmentation, each quite literally equal.

I just wish Diesel in Poland would have a little fun at Microsoft's expense and pop the blond head onto the brown body.

Just in time for th-th-th-the holidays

The ad states, "To commemorate the inauguration of our 44th president with a well-known American icon, introducing (ch-ch-ch-chia) Chia Obama. This Chia Obama is a special edition, and a collectors item...your Chia Obama is a symbol of liberty, opportunity, prosperity and hope." (With all due respect to the president, it seems a bit premature to be associating Obama with prosperity.)

The ad continues, "Chia Obama makes the statement, 'I'm proud to be an American.'" Yes, because nothing says patriotism like a 6" terra cotta bust with a living green afro.

I suspect this will be the best selling Chia ever, not because of patriotism but because of gag gifting---though the $19.95 cost is a high price point for this economy.

Wish you could show your patriotism with a poorly molded clay trinket but can't bring yourself to showing support for a socialist? The fine folks at Chia have provided the opportunity:
Nice hedging job on the original GW, no? Though my favorite is the Soultrain-circa-77 version of Miss Liberty.

Of course, I don't blame Obama for such shamelessly mercenary promotions. Though I do blame him for this shameless shilling for a new talk show starring George Lopez. Seriously? The President of United States mutating his campaign slogans to promote a soon-to-be-canceled late-night show? No chia obama for me, thank you.

One-upping the competition

The outdoor ad at the bus stop proclaimed, “4G Mobile Internet”. I'm no expert on internet mobile technology, and I do not know what features make it “fourth generation”, but it seems an obvious way to one-up your 3G competitors. What good is 3G in a 4G world?

Unfortunately, it reminds me of the hitchhiker in Something About Mary whose brilliant business plan is to outdo Eight Minute Abs with his own Seven Minute Abs. Or perhaps Nigel Tufnel’s treatise on amplifier power in Spinal Tap is a better example:

Nigel Tufnel: The numbers all go to eleven. Look, right across the board, eleven, eleven, eleven and...

Marty DiBergi: Oh, I see. And most amps go up to ten?

Nigel: Exactly.

Marty: Does that mean it's louder? Is it any louder?

Nigel: Well, it's one louder, isn't it? It's not ten. You see, most blokes, you know, will be playing at ten. You're on ten here, all the way up, all the way up, all the way up, you're on ten on your guitar. Where can you go from there? Where?

Marty: I don't know.

Nigel: Nowhere. Exactly. What we do is, if we need that extra push over the cliff, you know what we do?

Marty: Put it up to eleven.

Nigel: Eleven. Exactly. One louder.

Marty: Why don't you just make ten louder and make ten be the top number and make that a little louder?

Nigel: [pause] These go to eleven.

If the coveted "G" is the measure of power, freshness, and leading-edge value, and all that’s required to outdo the competition is to have the marketing department switch one character in the ads, I expect our 4G days are already numbered. Christmas is just around the corner, and I expect Santa is packing his sleigh with 5G.

Hit...and miss

At first, I liked Clear’s overarching “This is not…” campaign. It came to my attention as a bus rider, an outdoor campaign that appeared at many bus shelters with the headline, “This is not a bus shelter. It’s another place to get high-speed Internet.” I liked that it cleverly relabeled the world as Clear territory.

Then I saw, “This is not a rooftop. It’s another place to get high-speed Internet.” Well, that’s a bit more of a stretch, but many Portland rooftops are designed for human activity, so okay, it’s all part of the campaign.

Then I saw the Clear installation truck that read, “This is not a truck. It’s another place to get high-speed Internet.” Now wait a minute, a truck? Well, okay, with a laptop, sitting in the cab, okay.

Then the last straw: “This is not a billboard. It’s another place to get high-speed Internet.” What?! You can’t install any noun at the end of that tagline and pass it off as marketing. How is a billboard a place to get high-speed internet? Am I supposed to climb up on the billboard superstructure with my laptop? Completely illogical, and the campaign was ruined for me. What’s next, print ads saying, “This is not a newspaper?” Television saying, “This is not a television.”?

Too bad, too, because I later received a direct mail piece that began, in the familiar font, colors and logo, “This is not rocket science”, which was clever, but I was still stuck on billboards.