{Another Story about Glue}
Just when you thought America’s infatuation with coffee was exhausted, along comes the next generation of bean purveyors with a twist. Except the twist is really pretty stupidly simple (which, if you know me, is my motto on almost everything branding and business).
Intelligentsia Fresh Roasted Coffee is about good coffee, grown, shipped, roasted, and brewed right. Seems too simple to work as a premise. And that is the premise exactly.
Intelligentsia has been making news for a while now (since the mid 1990’s), if you live in Chicago or Los Angeles. Here at the start of 2008, however, accolades have been rolling in faster than it takes to brew the perfect cup, which, for this indie roaster and coffeehouse, is an every cup experience.
Los Angles Magazine voted them one of 2008 Best New Restaurants because of their “life-changing brew.” Forbes ranks them in the ten best coffee houses in the United States. Women’s Health magazine listed them as the Best Cup of Joe. The New York Times pumped them up with a great review, calling Intelligentsia’s $3 cappuccino a “work of art,” and touting the Clover (that makes it) “a machine with a cult following.”
Only in 2008 could machines have cult followings.
Doug Zell believes that coffee is as nuanced as fine wine. Well, at least his is, anyway. Founded by Zell, Emily Mange, and Geoff Watts, Intelligentsia is all about perfection in the basics. And this little coffee-that-could company is big time about Direct Trade with the growers themselves. Social responsibility and a commitment to sustainable methods are more than cover songs for this band of coffee fanatics. It’s their core truth, just as much as that simply perfect cup of java. Then again, this is not a new story in coffee.
So when you get down to the last drop, what is it about the hottest Joe in town that makes it different from the other hot coffee-craze roasters?
Exquisite taste.
Really? Aren’t all good coffees about that?
This one is different according to those who swear by it.
Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? How could something that freakishly simple and obvious be the cause of such buzz about Intelligentsia?
Maybe it’s because they actually deliver it.
Let’s see, they have an inspired vision (be it simple and obvious), make
good on their promise – and they don’t stop there. They deliver the taste
every step along the way.
Align and Glue. Align and Glue.
Intelligentsia took their simple vision and aligned it at every point in the process and Glued those points to those little nodules on that reptilian part of your brain that Starbucks first tweaked all those years ago.
That is called branding.
When you do it right, you succeed. If what we’re reading in every publication in the country is correct, Intelligentsia is success with a double-shot of caffeine affogato style.
These people talk about their Roasters (the human Roasters, not the machines, and yes, they capitalize the R word) like skilled painters or professional athletes. The roasting machines are equally legendary in status – handmade, vintage 1950’s era, cast iron perfection built in Stuttgart, Germany. Can you say, “Porsche?”
They don’t over-roast the pampered green beans into charred little pucks either. I won’t go into how many new coffee companies have throwndown on Starbucks for their roasting strategy. Not to defend Starbucks (they hardly need my defense), but that dark roasting has worked pretty darned well for the big guy, considering.
Intelligentsia keeps the interest going with a brewing process using the Clover (of the cult following), an $11,000 perfect brewing wet-bean dream (only 68 Clovers in the US). It brews like a French press without the sediment and squeezes a cup of perfection so subtle; women cry and old men rewrite their wills to leave their earthly possessions to this mechanical java divination contraption.
Here’s my take: Before Starbucks turned a commodity into a passion; before Howard Shultz made it nationally acceptable to pay outrageous moolah for a cup of bean juice, we looked at the drippings from ground brown as a cheap buzz.
Precise execution of a simple concept built on focused branding turned one of man’s most basic beverages into the phenom we now see as Starbucks. Constant aligning and Gluing that brilliant Starbucks brand to a unique customer experience made Starbucks into the ubiquitous visible target everyone sips today. Starbucks even owns the smell of roasted coffee because few people had ever smelled such a thing before. Starbucks’ extreme coffee makeover made old Joe sexy – and expensive.
We can all attack them, as we often attack Wal-Mart, but there is a reason why they are attackable: Like it or not in hindsight, they redefined existing categories and redefined our experiences with those categories. Starbucks aligned and Glued a lot.
Would Target ‘s success be possible without the demise of Sears and the ascension of Wal-Mart? Would Intelligentsia and Storyville coffee be possible without Starbucks? Would Starbucks be possible without Peet’s?
Would any of them be possible without visionary aligning and strategic Gluing?
