It has been a busy start of the year for the Starbucks marketing team. In a matter of days the company celebrated their 40th anniversary with a change on their logo, they introduced the Trenta - oversized cup, nationally launched the mobile payment system and made it by a landslide on the 2011 "Best Companies to Work For" list.
It looks like the mobile payment app system is part of an overall marketing campaign, where Starbucks is trying to create Brand Equity by reminding people why they loved Starbucks in first place: portraying Starbucks as a place that welcomes innovative ideas and that is geared towards fulfilling customer's needs even before the customer is aware of these needs in the first place.
In part, the call for increasing brand equity may come from the fact that the company suffered bad publicity during the hardest times of the economic downturn, where they had to close several hundreds of stores and fire thousands of people. The image of Starbucks being the “hip and original” coffee shop was substituted in some of their customers minds for the “cookie cut, over-priced big company coffee place". Perhaps, these new campaigns are an attempt to “go back to basics”, to the original notion of innovation, customer service and taking care of its people.
In the meantime, since it’s just been tested-out, we’ll have to wait and see how this new technology develops and what will be the costumer's impression when using it, but the marketing capabilities and ingenuity of the company definitely look very promising at least for the near future.
Sources:
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Starbucks-gives-logo-a-new-apf-1766882105.html?x=0&.v=3
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/bestcompanies/2011/full_list/
http://gizmodo.com/5735822/the-new-starbucks-trenta-cup-is-bigger-than-your-stomach
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Mobile-Payment-Debuts-bw-1926630830.html?x=0&.v=1
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/starbucks_corporation/index.html
Friday, January 21, 2011
Saturday, January 8, 2011
Intellectual property vs. Information sharing
The natural rights of an author should be protected equally around the world, especially with the rapid spread of information through the internet and the acceleration of technology. Even though we are used to ''sharing'' everything nowadays, when it comes to intellectual property we must take into account that it is private property for which the owner should be compensated for its use. With that in mind, the European Union launched several directives as an attempt to deal with copyright issues brought up by digital technology. As stated by Harald Von Hielmcrone , this in general has been beneficial to copyright holders, providing them "remuneration for public lending, prolongation of the term of protection, and legal protection of databases, and with respects to right to remuneration for reproductions, communications to the public rights and distribution rights."[1] But the key issue is that the way we share information has changed, and businesses, companies, artists, and copyright owners in general must adapt and take advantage of these new methods of information transfer, rather than fight against them.
Countries like France and the UK have very strict rules concerning intellectual property protection. The Hadopi Law and the digital Economy Act, laws under effect in France and the United Kingdom, respectively, have as a goal "to punish everyone who downloads from the Internet protected works, free of charge or without the permission of the Intellectual Property owner".[2] The premise of the Hadopi law for instance is that anyone who downloads protected goods from the network without paying royalties, after the third warning, can be banned from the internet. Achieving this is exceedingly difficult, since it would require monitoring every possible access to the network, which is a very costly endeavor.
So the initiative of some artists to actually embrace this new form of sharing files and getting their "product" out there is proving to be a much more effective way to approach the synergy that needs to start happening between intellectual property rights and sharing information. It's a much faster way to reach the consumer for artists, getting feedback and potentially increasing the number of followers as well.
Endnotes:
[1] Von Hielmcrone, Harald (2000). "The Efforts of the European Union to harmonize Copyright and Impact on the Freedom of Information." Vol 50. pp 36. http://www.librijournal.org/pdf/2000-1pp29-36.pdf
[2] Manacorda, Paola (2009). "The Intellectual Property as a New good." WIPO. pp 2.
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