Onward (51 page)

And from a marketing perspective, every aspect of the product had to brazenly defy instant coffee's stigma.

First, we had to find the perfect name.

More art than science, naming a product is akin to going on a treasure hunt without a map. There is no guaranteed route. We
hired outside experts. We sat in rooms and brainstormed. We e-mailed each other in the middle of the night. How about Sidekick? Spark? Café Cadabra? SB Kazam? Little Hero? Or why not just sub-brand it Starbucks Instant? At its peak, the list of possible names neared 500, which was whittled down based on evolving criteria. At one point, our internal creative studio added one. VIA. It made the short list of names.

Via
, it turns out, is Italian for “street” or “route,” and could connote “on the go” or “between places.” Not only did it speak to my original Italian inspiration for Starbucks, but it also communicated the intended nature of the product. Portable. Readily available. VIA was also tight and easy to pronounce. The word itself, when printed in all capital letters, looked elegant. The marketing team's vote was almost unanimous.

“We have it,” Aimee and Michelle said when they entered my office. I heard it and hesitated, taking a moment to digest it.
VIA.
Eventually it hit me:

VIA.

V
alenc
IA
.

I thought of Don and smiled.

We really had discovered the perfect name.

I was extremely disappointed.

It was a Friday afternoon, just days before VIA's packaging had to be finalized, and I was not at all happy with the generic, rainbow-colored designs I was being shown. Something was missing. The boxes that held the coffee's single-serve sleeves lacked an all-important nonverbal appeal that would convince consumers that VIA was not their grandmother's instant coffee—but rather a revolutionary yet familiar drinking experience. I knew the creative team behind the designs had tried hard. And I knew it was the 11
^th
hour as the clock ticked toward VIA's scheduled launch date. But still I shook my head. I couldn't do it. I could not approve the creative even though a redesign risked disrupting the schedule. Too many people had worked too hard and for too long, and too much was at stake, not to get every detail pitch-perfect.

While VIA's package would not in and of itself lead to the product's success, the wrong design could kill it. I knew it could be better. No
compromises. So rather than sending it back for a redo and hoping for the best, I did something I would have done during Starbucks’ earliest, most entrepreneurial days.

“Come to my house Sunday,” I told only Aimee and Michelle. I did not invite anyone else from Starbucks or explain why until they arrived.

“This is Jack Anderson.” I proudly introduced Aimee and Michelle to the cofounder of Hornall Anderson, one of Seattle's oldest strategic branding and design firms. Jack had worked with me during Starbucks’ earliest years, when his firm had designed the identity for Frappuccino as well as the stores’ first shopping bags and catalogs, bringing a much-needed warmth and earthiness to the brand. This was one of those times when Starbucks’ transformation demanded attention from someone who inherently understood my language and the gestalt of the brand.

At my request, Jack had come with one of his most talented designers, David Bates, and the firm's vice president of strategy, Laura Jakobsen. They did not know Starbucks was about to launch an instant coffee named VIA or that I wanted them to redesign the package.

I could not have been more resolute or eager in my explanation. “This product will be so foreign to our customers and our partners that, to get people to believe in it, to try it, it must have a certain look and feel that is reminiscent of a Starbucks product but still connotes innovation.” As I knew he would, Jack got it, and within the week his team and Aimee's were collaborating.

News that I'd brought in an outside firm under the radar met with some inevitable frustration. It was never my intent to undermine anyone, but there were moments throughout the transformation—and for that matter throughout Starbucks’ history—when I had to make tough choices, at times deciding that the best interests of the organization were contrary to the interests of an individual or group. Sacrificing people's feelings, and more than once even a personal relationship, for the good of thousands of partners is one of the most painful elements of my job as Starbucks’ chief executive.

Bringing Jack and his colleagues back into the Starbucks fold proved a wise move. In a simple yet brilliant design, the firm met the packaging challenge by transferring the quality and trust associated with beverages sold in Starbucks stores to VIA. On the front of each small box that contained VIA's narrow, single-serve foil packets was a cutout with
the distinctive profile of a Starbucks coffee cup. Also on the package, on an inner panel behind the cutout, was an adaptation of the check boxes that appear on every white Starbucks hot-coffee cup; these are the squares baristas mark to indicate customers’ drink preferences—decaf and shots, syrup, and milk. The visual representation of our iconic cup and the boxes were analogues of Starbucks’ in-store experience, referencing the heritage of the company while simultaneously validating the new product's quality. Subtle yet straightforward. Sophisticated without being gimmicky. Utterly authentic.

Hornall Anderson also helped us better articulate VIA's unique, simple promise in a tagline: Never be without great coffee. With VIA, it was now possible for people to enjoy a high-quality cup of natural, ethically sourced coffee in places and at times when the option had not been available. A sachet of VIA in a purse, pocket, or backpack, for example, meant enjoying Starbucks coffee when hiking. On any airplane. On a job site. In a foreign country. In a dorm room, at other people's houses, or in one's own home in lieu of brewing a full pot.

The greater marketing challenge, however, was figuring out how to talk about the product so people immediately understood that VIA was not just another instant coffee, but the game changer many of us believed it to be. I never forgot another sage piece of advice I heard from Costco's Jim Sinegal, who encouraged me not to run away from the word “instant,” but to embrace it. There was a lot of debate internally about this. Should we even associate VIA with instant, given its negative connotation? Was our new coffee even in the same category as instant? Eventually, our creative studio crafted a simple, elegant turn of phrase that effectively reframed the way the product was viewed. A phrase that connoted a new beverage as well as a new behavior. The line—”Starbucks coffee, in an instant”—said it all.

The positioning. The packaging. The name.

Each of these elements would help recast public opinion about what instant coffee could be. But for VIA to succeed, our partners had to view it with the same respect they had for every other Starbucks coffee. Overcoming the company's own bias was a top priority, and again I could not do it alone.

In their own efforts to build consensus, Aimee and her colleague Brady Brewer, a vice president of marketing, had discovered a solution.
If partners knew VIA was an instant coffee prior to trying it, then they brought to the experience negative assumptions that tainted their perception. So we fooled them. At one meeting, every partner received two small paper cups and was told that he or she would be tasting two different brewed Starbucks coffees. As people sipped and discussed the flavors, no one questioned the samples’ authenticity. But when it was announced that both cups were Starbucks’ new instant coffee, the collective evaporation of bias was almost palpable. The element of surprise had displaced suspicion.

This trick was played out again and again in our offices and conference rooms, in stores with partners, even in my own dining room at dinner parties when I secretly served VIA to guests. The surprise taste test created a snowball of acceptance.

Rather than fearing skepticism, we were using it, a tactic that would help turn the tide when we launched VIA publicly.

At first, however, our fears did come true.

On February 13, 2009, four days before the official public announcement that Starbucks would enter the instant coffee market, this headline ran on the investment website the Motley Fool: “No, Starbucks, Please Don't!”

The news
about
VIA—but not VIA itself—had been leaked to
Advertising Age
, and a rash of bloggers had responded by criticizing a product they had never tasted. The Fool column wrote about Starbucks’ “plans to delve—or is the word
devolve
?—into the world of instant coffee” and blatantly asked, “Is Howard Schultz panicking, getting desperate to show that management's doing something,
anything
?” Other bloggers harped on how we were “trading down” to instant coffee despite its reputation for “poor quality and so-so taste,” as one blogger put it, adding, “How many aspiring poets, musicians and philosophers will go to Starbucks to think profound thoughts and guzzle
instant
coffee?”

With the bloggers being so merciless, a small part of me was still wondering what the mainstream media would say when, on February 17, 2009, I took the stage in front of a standing-room-only press conference in New York City to announce VIA. In the audience were individuals whom we wanted to taste VIA and understand the business opportunity before they rushed to judgment and influenced public
opinion when VIA was launched as a test in stores in Seattle, Chicago, and London over the next few weeks.

I looked out at these influencers quietly sipping the cups of Colombian and Italian coffee we had poured for them as part, we had said, of a routine coffee tasting, which often preceded Starbucks’ meetings. Which was true. Finally, with the tempered excitement of a kid quietly unloading a great secret he'd been keeping, I revealed that both coffees were—surprise—a new long-term strategy for Starbucks. VIA Ready Brew.

“Yes, it fooled us,”
The
New York Times'
s Joe Nocera would write in his column.

I had gotten their attention. Now I had to convince them that instant coffee was no Hail Mary pass for Starbucks, but a homegrown innovation grounded in our coffee roots with tremendous implications for the company's future.