If my graying friends are listening to a band from New Jersey, Springsteen’s probably hunched front and center, screaming the everyday lyrics of a tortured life. Some may even admit to an affection for Bon Jovi. So why am I listening to Jersey’s other band that is crushing the music world right now, My Chemical Romance? Not sure. Is it the parade beat? Is it lines like, “When you grow up would you be the savior of the broken, the beaten and the damned?” Is it the ghostly, glam, punk leftover smell of the late ’80s bands that scared Reaganites into BMW dealerships? Still not sure. Maybe I’m Johnny Cashing my old age to a rendezvous with Nine Inch Nails. Or maybe it’s that addiction I picked up at Starbucks that has me living below my cultural age limit.
Which brings me to the next unobvious question: So what will Starbucks get into next?
Years ago they yanked my last drop of cheap Maxwell House and poured a six-buck Frappuccino with whipped cream down my wallet. They encored that with music and CD’s and now they’re selling books and getting involved in movies like “Akeelah and the Bee.” What’s next? Deep AVO:
“Just when you thought it was safe to buy a grande, double-decaf latte, Robin Williams is ‘The Man Who Spent His Life Savings on Frappuccinos’!” Starts Friday.
Howard Schultz is bucking for a space next to Walt Disney’s head in the freezer of the future. All the while, I’m humming under my pungently coffee-caffeinated breath, “There’s a place in the dark where the animals go/You can take off your skin in the cannibal glow.” They’re not playing that one at Starbucks, but the confusion is perfectly normal. Between My Chemical Romance’s cheeky Pink Floydish verbiage and my own chemical romance already shared with Mr. Schultz’s brand, I am starting to think that smell is not roasted Sumatra beans but the aroma of hard, cold cash leaving my checking account.
Starbucks is not pushing My Chemical Romance or their music. Way too far out there for their acoustic cool. They’re still compiling Ray Charles favorites even though he’s been dead for a while now. But the rush of culture-adjusting nuance is deafening. The lines between your coffee and your music and your favorite next book or movie are smudged into a house blend of rich complexity that only a Seattle-trained barista could concoct. Ask Mitch Albom; his new book is now available next to the chocolate-covered espresso beans. Even investment advisors are saying that your retirement will be affected by your expensive, daily Starbucks jones. So now my nest egg is being Starbucked into oblivion along with my classic rockishness. I’ll take my senior citizen poverty affogato style.
If all that is true, I have just one question: When I grow up will I be the savior of the broken, the beaten and the damned? My Chemical Romance seems to be the cause of it all. It’s the music, the band, the lyrics, the coffee, the books, the movies and the branding.
The next time you sit in a meeting about branding and marketing and advertising, and somebody on the agency side brings up Starbucks as an example of just about anything related to any of those things, you can rest assured that a chemical romance is involved. And maybe that’s the secret to your business strategy. You need to slip out of your linear branding clothes and begin the eye-opening understanding of that subtle but powerful thing called cultural gravity. It is real and measurable. And not only are you surrounded by it right now as you read these words, so are your customers. Like it or not, understand it or not, that’s what is changing branding: a deeply emotional experience and connection to something that makes me feel better right now.
Maybe you’re selling plumbing supplies or health insurance. Maybe you’re an energy company or a financial group or a grocery store or a produce stand. Maybe you can think of five hundred reasons why your company and products are not remotely like Starbucks or a cultural revolution. The executives in the coffee industry thought the same thing when they asked, “Who in the world will buy a $6 cup of coffee?”
We all did.