Free The Starbucks Story by John Simmons Page B

than the provision of private capital. In arriving at that point, though, it had made some solid decisions that consolidated its own understanding of the Starbucks brand. And it had come to realize what it had perhaps always felt: that the brand was its greatest asset. It was the brand that allowed it, almost effortlessly it seemed, to roll out a program of store openings through the rest of America and, in time, through many other countries in the world.
    What were the pillars of this brand? The mission statement and the six principles, certainly. The visual identity, and also the language of coffee that Starbucks was creating. But other things too, that seemed to come in clusters of three. First, the realization that if you give equal value to your product, your own people and your customers, you will have the foundations of a strong brand. Then, almost mirroring this in its structure, the bringing together of a tight business team, a core of three people with contrasting personalities but shared ambitions: Howard Schultz to supply the vision, Howard Behar to focus on the soul, and Orin Smith to provide the discipline. One final use of three: the all-important notion of the third place. Put all this together, and a world-beating brand was in the making.

 
    When I was writing a previous book, The invisible grail , I decided to write one chapter while traveling from home to work, day after day, on the London Underground. In my mind, I had discovered a version of “the third place.” Starbucks has long considered that it provides the third place for its customers, a welcoming, accepting environment between home and work. Perhaps we all need a third place, in whatever form we find it, because it is a space for our minds to feel at ease. For previous generations it might have been the pub or the club; for people today it might be the bar or the gym. Perhaps more by luck than design, Starbucks found itself positioned as the perfect third place for the late twentieth century.
 
    When Howard Schultz began to think about it, he was surprised that the original idea of Italian-style espresso bars had grown into a completely new paradigm. Clearly, the idea was now much bigger and more powerful than he had first imagined. A need was being fulfilled, and that need could not be expressed as “for people who love a great cup of coffee.” There was a deeper resonance at work here.
    A number of people inside and outside Starbucks started to think about this. Ray Oldenburg, a Florida sociologist, wrote an influential book called
The great good place
. He described the need for informal public spaces where people can come together. Perhaps the European coffee houses had played such a role in the past; perhaps American barber shops had performed a similar function. The theory was based on the observation that urban life brings together great masses of people but often leaves individuals feeling isolated in the crowd.
    To some extent, all successful brands are social. They bring people together and enable them to identify with others in a crowd without losing their sense of individuality. Some of the most iconic brands capture this duality of individual sociability: Guinness, for example. By drawing on your inner strength, you become all the more individual and true to your own personality while relating more successfully to all the other individuals around you. It is difficult, perhaps impossible, for brands to succeed by appealing purely to the loner. One of the most famous brand failures was a 1950s cigarette launched with heavy advertising and the slogan: “You’re never alone with a Strand.” People did not want a life where satisfaction was defined as being on your own with only a cigarette for company.
    As the Starbucks brand has developed, the notion of the third place has become more entrenched. The music, the seating, the level of ambient noise allow you to feel included in the social place even when you are on your own. One