A Brand Is the Sum of All Touchpoints

by Guy Smith

Published on September 28, 2004

Tags: Brand Positioning, Branding, Customer Experience, High-Tech Marketing, Sales

There is a legendary story about Starbucks, its brand, and toilet paper.

From within the offices of Starbucks, a branding guru had summarized the Starbucks brand into an extremely concise brand statement: A great coffee experience.

This brand statement encompassed the Starbucks store design, bean selection, barista personalities… even its toilet paper.

It seems that some smart guru hired by Starbucks wanted to downgrade from two-ply to one-ply toilet paper in store restrooms. He calculated a significant cost savings based on deep analysis of the comparative cost of toilet paper, the number of Starbuck stores, how many rolls per year were needed… and so on.

But Starbucks didn't agree, and the stores kept the thicker two-ply paper to preserve their "great coffee experience."

Quite literally, Starbucks was worried about all branding touchpoints.

→ end article preview
Read the Full Article

Membership is required to access this how-to marketing article ... don't worry though, it's FREE!

WANT TO READ MORE?
SIGN UP TODAY ... IT'S FREE!

Your email :

We will never sell or rent your email address to anyone. We value your privacy. (We hate spam as much as you do.) See our privacy policy.

Sign in with your existing account. Simply click your preferred account below!

Guy Smith is the founder of Silicon Strategies Marketing (www.SiliconStrat.com), a marketing firm that specializes in strategic marketing and market development for technology companies. Guy has a background as a technologist for NASA, McDonnell Douglas, and Circuit City and remains active in technology, primarily within the Open Source community.

NOTE: MarketingProfs does not allow its content to be lifted wholesale and republished elsewhere without a licensing agreement. For more information on copyright and licensing, see here.