Anne Saunders is VP of Global Brand Strategy at Starbucks.  Yesterday, she was named a "top ten" marketing innovator by Advertising Age. 

AA notes the things for which Saunders and Starbucks are so justly famous, especially the creation of a robust brand with a tiny budget and almost no conventional advertising.  (This year, Starbucks will spend 1% of its sales on marketing.)

Some of Saunders’ innovations are grass roots options like serving PTA meetings or sponsoring beach cleanups. Clearly, she was also the beneficiary of the extraordinary meaning making, brand building qualities of Starbucks’ "third space"  retail.

But Saunders also created innovation out of naturally occurring experiments that have occurred at Starbucks.

In the fall of 2005, a Starbucks barista in California gave a drive-through customer a free cup of coffee.  (She was apologizing for having got an order wrong.)  The lucky customer was struck by a moment of generosity and decided to pay for the person next in line.  This luckly customer did the same for the customer behind her, and an articulated act of generosity ran for 9 transactions until someone decided to take the coffee and run. 

This reminds me of Levi-Strauss’ discussion of patrons in a french restaurant.  Two men, perfect strangers sitting at separate tables, treat one another to a glass of wine.  Nothing changes (both men consume the same amount of wine) and everything does (perfect strangers acknowledge one another). 

In the case of the French restaurant, we are looking at a "tit for tat" reciprocity: I do for you what you do for me.  In the Starbucks’ case, we are looking at something more open-ended (in the anthro lingo: "generalized").  My gift does not "return" to my benefactor.  It goes to someone who may or may not reciprocate it.  There is an element of risk.  I give to you, without any quarantee that you will give to someone else. 

Reciprocity is a powerful device.  It creates or helps substantiate a relationship.  Generalized reciprocity of the Starbucks’ kind is still more powerful.  It has a way of transforming the customer from just another schmoe into someone new.

The person who gives without any guarantee of return is a paragon of generosity, someone who feels their generosity instead of risking it.  This is someone who is, in the Western and not only the Western scheme of things, a little god-like. After all this Starbucks customer just got a free coffee!  If they want to, they are free to break faith.  They can take the coffee and run. Those who decide to perpetuate the gift with a special kind of generosity.  And this stands as a special measure of their spirit and their goodness. 

Clearly, Starbucks generosity picks up on something at work in our culture, the "random acts of kindness" theme that is still operative well after the 1960s have come and gone, and even as the "new age" sensibility struggles to sustain itself in a time of post 9/11 severity.  It also plays out that "pass it on" theme for which, I believe a movie was named.  Finally, it plays out that idea that we don’t need to know the recipients of our generosity, and that, indeed, there was something charming about not knowing the recipient of our generosity.   Apparently, we like to participate in and help build networks where the nodes are unknown to one another.  Strange. 

Ok, here’s what Starbucks and Saunders chose to do with their stroke of good forture, that naturally occurring moment of Starbucks generosity. According to AA, "The marketing department created a coupon that told the story and asked recipients to hand the coupon to a friend or co-worker to invite them to have free cup of coffee." 

This is good but I wonder if there isn’t another opportunity.  Why not give the barista the opportunity to hand out free coffee as if they were passing along someone else’s generosity?  Sometimes, the recipient will take the coffee and run.  But sometimes they will step up to the opportunity and pass the gift along, with all the benefits to Starbucks and themselves that this entails.  "Oh," says the next customer, "some thing odd and interesting and sort of charming just happened."  The hum drum of daily life is relieved a little.  The growing hum drum of the Starbucks is relieved a lot. 

I like the way this strategy gives the barista something to work with.  As it is, many baristas appear to be engaged in a "too cool for school" demonstration played out in a drama called "how slow can I go."  The generosity play allows them to give coffee to people and see what happens.  Will the recipient pay for the next customer or not?  We can guess that baristas will compete to see who is best at choosing recipients who will pass it on. The world on the other side of the counter suddenly got a lot more interesting and engaging for them.  If this helps them speed up, or brighten up, by even 10%, Starbucks will pay for those free coffees many times over.

There are lots of cautionary notes here.  It is not entirely ethical to create the impression that a free coffee comes from someone else when in fact it comes from Starbucks.   But notice that what we are doing here is seeding the world with generosity. Presumably, one Starbucks’ gift will generate several others that are real acts of generosity.  Surely, this small deception may be forgiven on the grounds that it creates a larger social good. 

Some people will balk at taking a gift from a perfect strangers on the Miltonian grounds that there is no such thing as a free cup of coffee, and because they may have indebted themselves to a creep.  This will have to be addressed, monitored and finessed. 

There is also the danger that this will become predictable and the further danger that it will become a mechanical system to be worked.  And corporations have a history of taking good ideas and making them banal through the repetition and mechanization.   A system of this kind will have to take touch. 

What I really like about this is the anthropological revelation, nothing changes (everyone gets their coffee) but Starbucks has found a way to make my purchase work to your benefit, and our purchases work to everyone’s benefit.  Starbucks’ renews itself, the social world gets a little more interesting, and life takes on a new generosity, drama, and dynamism. 

This is brand building for the cost of a cup of coffee!

References

Mitchell Moore, Meg.  2006.  The Innovators: Anne Saunders.  Advertising Age. October 4, 2006.  here. (subscription required)

McCracken, Grant.  2003.  Tag, we’re it!  The blogs sits at the intersection of anthropology and economics.  January 5, 2003.  here.