Half the battle of getting something right is figuring out what you did wrong. And 90% of that battle is admitting you did anything wrong in the first place. That’s why I found a recent article in The Wall Street Journal about Starbucks’ uber-strategist, Michelle Gass, so encouraging. Here’s a woman who catapulted to the top (and won the ear of Howard Schultz) based on her enormous successes with Frappuccino, Tazo teas and Ethos water and has managed to stay there despite having also overseen “some big flops” as the Journal bluntly put it. Like that Chantico product, for example, whose advertising I couldn’t say enough good things about back in January of 2005.
So why wasn’t Chantico her Waterloo? Well, according to this article “…those flops haven’t slowed Ms. Gass’s ascent at the company because she’s good at learning from her mistakes.” Which is no small accomplishment in the world of business. Honestly, much as it’s been said that the only thing that can kill a politician’s career is getting caught in bed with a dead woman or a live boy, I’ve often thought the only thing most senior executives would rather die than get caught doing is admitting they don’t know something or acknowledging they were wrong about anything.
Obviously, Ms. Gass has a head start on that pack. But there’s still the matter of being right about what it is you got wrong. And the recent advertising for Starbucks’ Pike Place Blend coffee, which you see scattered around here, makes me wonder if she hasn’t committed the cardinal sin of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Sure, the Chantico product was a hypoglycemic disaster. But it’s advertising was quite engaging, whereas this stuff is about as extraordinary as a cup of diner coffee circa 1970.
And oddly enough, I’m pretty sure it’s being done by the same agency, one surefire giveaway being its employment of a color palette visible only to bees. (That’s how frustrated art directors at creative agencies get their revenge on recalcitrant clients while simultaneously assuaging their consciences–by being able to say, “well, at least the look is unexpected.” Which in this case it certainly is. Exceeded only by the utterly unexpected butt-simple, in-your-face headlines that go with it.
If this is Ms. Gass’s mistake–concluding that the failure of a product was as much the fault of its extraordinary advertising as it was of the product itself–that’s a shame. Because with all that’s resting on the success of this new coffee blend for Starbucks, it could certainly benefit from some more extraordinary advertising. Something this agency is clearly capable of. So I guess now we’ll all get to see how deserving she is of this reputation for “learning from her mistakes.”
And while I’m on that subject, I stumbled across an interesting coda to that Ford piece I put up a little while ago. Again, in The Wall Street Journal, there was an article praising Ford CEO Alan Mulally’s significant improvements in Ford’s earnings and operations. Unfortunately, near the article’s conclusion there was this statement: “To create a new image for Ford, Mr. Mullaly poached Jim Farley, a Toyota marketing guru.” Now there’s a mistake just begging for admission and rectification. Not Mr. Farley, per se. On the contrary, in the Sunday New York Times this week there was an article about him that made him sound like a terrific guy. But Ford’s new “Drive One” advertising, another dozen examples of which I’ve seen since I wrote about it, continues to drive this one nuts.
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