by: Cameron MacKenzie
I’ve heard it said that you can tell a lot about somebody by their Starbucks order.
In the morning I’m a grande coffee, black. Don’t care about the origin of the beans at this point, I’m desperate.
Afternoon I used to be tall coffee, also black. It was what I knew, and it was cheap. But then one day, by complete accident, I tried a latte. Boom. Hooked. It was about two bucks more but I told myself that I had been in black coffee purgatory for a decade and I owed it to myself to lighten up a little.
So, every afternoon, tall hot latte, but after a while I realized this was a pretty basic order. I started to look around at what other people ordered, what other people drank. You know what I’m talking about. These skyscraping ice-cream-colored chocolate-drizzled constructions that look like something you’d get at the county fair.
So I looked at those orders and those people and shook my head. Then the summer came to where I live in the South. I saw this cold brew. Tried one. Nice. It checked off a lot of boxes: caffeine, cold, a whiff of sophistication (I’m a sucker for a little sophistication). Then I saw this cascara-thing version. Nice as well. Then one day the cascara thing was off the menu and they had another cold brew—some caramel-infused job. Tried it. VERY NICE. Still felt sophisticated. Still felt superior. Still felt like all was right with the afternoon. In fact, I started to feel like I’d stumbled on to a secret with this magic drink. Like I was the only one that knew. That this was MY drink, MY order. That Starbucks GOT me–got as in understood. And they’d gotten me alright, because that caramel-infusion is not only $1.50 more, but it functions as a gateway. To what? To more foam. More caramel. Maybe a little cream. Next thing you know I’m ordering a skyscraper. It had taken years to get me, but Starbucks had me.
It’s this sort of mission-creep that Starbucks has mastered (it made me want to go out and buy stock). It is a flattening-out, a saming of a vastly heterogeneous pool of people. The best companies do this very thing not so much to identify their customers, but to create their customers. This is what success looks like. For example, the smart-phone can do anything, and you can personalize your own by choosing one of two sizes and three colors. An SUV is just so practical (for what?). If you looked randomly at a thousand Facebook profiles, as personally curated as I’m sure they seem to their owners, I guarantee they would look exactly like the profiles of your own friends.
When I go out for coffee this afternoon, the fact that, from the very outset, I am chained to the Starbucks menu (not the Peet’s, or the Dunkin, or the Caribou or the three homegrown little coffeeshops in my town) only further demonstrates how my actual choices for caffeine (endless) have been rapidly whittled down to about four. Which four? The four on the Starbucks menu. And as the company moves that infused beverage from season to season (pumpkin spice anyone?) so do they move my choices, my desires, the thoughts in my head. Starbucks just gets me. Exactly right where they want me.
Opinions expressed here are those of the author and not necessarily those of SagePoint Financial, Inc.