TRIBAL KNOWLEDGE is more than just a book—it’s the beginning of a conversation between you, me, and others.  I say this because we have the opportunity to share comments, opinions, and rebuttals on everything written in the book. To spark discussion with those who’ve read TRIBAL KNOWLEDGE and with those who’ve yet to read it, I’ve included tidbits from each of the 47 TRIBAL TRUTHS detailed in the book.

There’s much to explore here so dig in and dig around.  Comments are more than welcomed—they are expected!  Enjoy.

A business cannot sustain itself on image, no matter how much money is dumped into sporadic, heavy-up advertising campaigns. Companies that put their money behind their brand and not their business fail to realize that the business is the brand. And to realize the full potential of the brand, one must work on and work in the business every day of every year.

Everything about the Starbucks experience marketed the Starbucks business: the coffee in the iconic white logo cup; the personal interaction between a customer and a Starbucks barista; the plush chairs, the in-store design scheme; the music playing overhead; the welcoming smell of the coffee; and the feeling customers had during their Starbucks “moment.” Starbucks learned the most effective way to spend its marketing dollars is not on making funnier television commercials but rather on making better customer experiences.

The marketplace is chock-full with all-too-similar goods and services in every category imaginable. How many people will actually go out of their way to buy what you’re selling if what you’re selling is nearly identical to everything else on the market? That’s why lasting brand loyalty is built on making the common uncommon—because while a price advantage, or more convenient locations, or whiz-bang product features may vanish tomorrow, uncommon quality attracts and connects with your customers in a powerfully personal and permanent way. Starbucks has taken the common cup of coffee and made it uncommonly better by focusing on higher-quality coffee beans, longer roasting styles, and more intense and enjoyable coffee experiences.

When businesses tell the story about why their products and services are remarkable, they engage in meaningful marketing. Meaningful marketing is about designing marketing activities to deliver on the vision of the business all the while being smart, savvy, and authentic. It’s about treating consumers as being everyday explorers who seek to be interesting and interested.

Companies that tell their story in a meaningful and genuine manner become endearing and enduring, while companies that make up stories are fleeting and in seemingly desperate need of attention. Which would you rather have your business associated with: endearing and enduring or fleeting and desperate?

Starbucks marketers have learned that viewing brand management as reputation management goes a long way toward fostering alignment across all business units inside a company as to what a brand is and, more important, what a strong brand can do.

Starbucks did not create the specialty coffee category in the United States. But by 1996 Starbucks clearly emerged as the leading specialty coffee retailer. And it established this leadership position not by creating interest in the Starbucks brand, but rather by creating intrigue with the specialty coffee category.

If Starbucks ever decided to run itself as a priced-to-sell retailer, it would be admitting the company no longer values a unique product or a unique customer experience. Seth Godin, author of Purple Cow, goes one step further, saying that a low-price strategy is “the last refuge of a . . . marketer who is out of great ideas.”

At Starbucks, marketers uncomplicate their work lives by realizing there are three, and only three ways a business can increase sales: (1) Get new customers to buy; (2) Get current customers to buy more, more often; and (3) Raise prices.

Just as your personal checkbook has credits and debits, a brand checkbook has credits and debits in the form of brand credits and brand debits. Brand credits are business activities that enhance the reputation and perception people have of a brand, and brand debits are those that detract from the reputation and perception of the brand.

It’s unrealistic to expect a business will participate only in brand credit marketing activities. But it is vitally important for a healthy, growing business to have more brand credits than brand debits. Otherwise, your brand checkbook will be in a constant state of brand debt.

Just as it never sought to create a brand, Starbucks never set its priority to become the biggest coffee retailer. Starbucks did, however, set out to become the best coffee retailer, trusting that growth would be a by-product of being the best.

Starbucks’ steadfast drive to become the best coffee retailer has resulted in its being the biggest coffee retailer.

“Location, location, location” is the most well-known mantra in the real estate game. Because of Starbucks, it is also becoming a well-known mantra for savvy businesses to receive free advertising exposure.

“How can we communicate in an honest way, and crack the code of what this human emotion is without looking like a Tide commercial?”
spoken by Howard Schultz, Starbucks chairman and visionary

To better engage customers with marketing communication that fosters an experiential and emotional relationship, Starbucks focuses on communicating the benefit of the benefit of everything it offers.

Starbucks marketers use a six-point unwritten code to ensure that the marketing programs they create and implement are authentic, that they’re staying on message and on brand, and that they tell the story of what makes the product they are promoting Starbucks-worthy. Ideally, every marketing program created and implemented at Starbucks adheres to the following six unwritten rules:

1. Be genuine and authentic

2. Evoke feelings, never prescribe feelings

3. Always say who you are, never who you are not

4. Stay connected to front-line employees

5. Deliver on all promises made

6. Respect people’s intelligence

Selecting the right merchandising assortment is risky, but Starbucks reduces the inherent risks by adhering to the following five unwritten merchandise relevancy guardrails:

1. Merchandise quality matches the high quality of Starbucks’ coffee.
2. Merchandise links directly to coffee or to a “coffee moment.”
3. Starbucks can make the product uncommonly better by adding innovation and or unique style.
4. The product offers distribution opportunities outside of Starbucks stores, such as grocery stores, online, etc.
5. The product provides customers “rewarding moments,” be it in a Starbucks store, in a customer’s home, at a customer’s place of work, or while a customer is on the go.

Customers have told Starbucks its image of authenticity and integrity has been enhanced by its limited use of traditional advertising. Many Starbucks customers hold the belief that traditional advertising shouldn’t be trusted, that it is an unnecessary marketing activity for Starbucks to engage in.

For Starbucks, action, not advertising, is the most effective way to drive sales and build a brand.

The innate culture at Starbucks understands that you become more effective by being more selective. You cannot expect to succeed when you attempt to implement multiple marketing programs at the same time. Customers will be confused, and you will become exhausted trying to manage everything.

Starbucks began with the mission of wanting to get the world to appreciate better tasting coffee. To put it simply, Starbucks has accomplished this mission. With the popularity and sustainability of the company, the next step is to make the transition from Starbucks as coffee “brand” to Starbucks as beverage “icon.” From this perspective, Starbucks is an upstart, competing against the old-school beverage icons like Coke and Pepsi. Starbucks considers itself a David because, compared to Goliath-proportioned Pepsi’s $30 billion and Coke’s $22.5 billion yearly revenues, its annual $6.5 billion is a blip in the megalithic beverage industry machine.

When it comes to delivering memorable customer experiences, Starbucks follows “The Law of Remarkability.” This little-known, rarely followed marketing principle simply states: Remarkable Things Get Remarked About. Because Starbucks strives to deliver memorable experiences, customers are more likely to tell their friends and family about Starbucks’ remarkability.

By tapping into people’s wants and offering them a way to actualize their aspirations, Starbucks has transcended the commoditization trap. Successful businesses find ways to close the aspirational gap by fulfilling consumer wants, not needs.

Starbucks focuses much of its store-level barista training programs on teaching employees to deliver not ordinary customer service but legendary customer service. However, Starbucks doesn’t totally rely on bulky and verbose training manuals to teach baristas how to deliver legendary customer service. Instead, Starbucks instills two customer-service-focused mantras in the hearts and minds of every barista: “Just Say Yes” and “Connect, Discover, Respond.”

When businesses follow through on the promises they’ve made to their customers, they’re displaying an integrity that’s necessary to building trust between customers and the brand; and they’re also showing a pride in the work they do—the products they make and the services they deliver. Ultimately, how a company follows through on its promises is more a reflection of who that company is and its reason for existing than anything else.

But delivering on promises is not enough today. Businesses, big or small, must find ways to over-deliver on their promises, implied and expressly stated, to customers. That means exceeding the usual expectations and going beyond the minimum corporate standard.

Starbucks may be global in scope, but it strives to be local in function through being a good neighbor in the communities it serves. Starbucks makes the business case for community involvement by quantifying its impact in five ways:

1. It increases employee moral, work performance, and attendance.
It increases employee retention rates
3. It increases employees’ leadership skills
4. It enhances a company’s reputation
5. It improves a publicly traded company’s stock performance and attracts investors

It may come as a surprise to you to learn the important factors in creating enthusiastically satisfied customers at Starbucks has nothing to do with complex Customer Relationship Marketing (CRM) applications and little to do with coffee. But they have everything to do with friendly baristas and clean stores. Starbucks has learned that being nice and being clean is the least complicated, yet most effective customer loyalty program a retailer can implement.

Starbucks has learned that customers appreciate the high-touch human interaction with store partners and not the high-tech mechanisms that attempt to emulate personal relationships, but are a poor substitute for the real thing.

It can be argued Starbucks’ success was partly built on sampling generously. Giving away free samples powerfully demonstrates to consumers the pride you have in your products. This pride breeds trust—there’s nothing underhanded or suspect about it. Your customers are smart enough to realize you’re offering them food and drink samples because you hope they’ll love it. They’re hoping to find that great product that fulfills their desire. By giving it away, you’re showing customers how sure you are they’ll love it and want it again and again.

Time will tell if focusing on music retailing and other forms of entertainment marketing will have Starbucks regretting its decision to leave its comfortable home of coffee in search of new ways to grow sales. Starbucks may be wise to heed its own tribal knowledge advice of “future success stems from past success” and focus more on coffee and less on music and movies to grow the business.

Starbucks marketers treat customers not as occasional tourists seeking superficial trinkets but as everyday explorers seeking stories.

Everyday explorers crave authentic experiences, big or small, that will enhance their social lives. Each Starbucks location serves as a community town hall where people gather as a group or as individuals to experience life in their own ways. Starbucks simply provides a comfortable space and social lubricants (coffee drinks), enabling people to share old stories or create new stories with each other or with themselves.

To foster customer loyalty that borders on customer devotion, Starbucks follows an unwritten but business-innate marketing mindset of enriching a customer’s life, not entrapping it.

Starbucks seeks to captivate (not capture) and enrich (not entrap) the lives of its customers through rewarding everyday moments. The company understands a great coffee moment can provide customers with hope, inspiration, and connectivity. A Starbucks coffee moment offers customers a semblance of hope in their cluttered lives. Many of Starbucks’ most devoted customers seek refuge from their workplace, their home life, and the daily commute in-between. To these customers, Starbucks is a place where they can go to regroup, reconnect, recharge, and rest.

All walls talk, no matter the business. Walls say something good or bad about businesses every day. The problem is, many businesspeople do not spend enough time in their stores to know what the walls are telling them. Instead they rely on second-hand reports or scrutinize store-specific financials to make observations. The solution is as easy as sitting in the store and observing. Keep in mind, if you can hear what the walls are telling you, your customers certainly can.

The sheer number of store locations Starbucks operates has changed its business proposition. Starbucks can no longer compete on being quirky and quaint. Let’s face it: It’s hard to be unique when you’re opening five new stores a day. Instead, Starbucks competes on being consistent and convenient.

You’d be hard pressed to find a Starbucks employee say, “That doesn’t matter. No customer will ever notice it.” Because chances are a customer will notice. And that’s why EVERYTHING MATTERS to Starbucks.

The best internal culture a company could hope for is one where the employees are so loyal they spread word of the company and its product with fierce passion, a culture where employees go way beyond being minions to being missionaries.

Turning minions into missionaries can only happen if the employees truly believe in the company. The company with missionary employees is one where the workforce is there because it wants to be, not because it needs to be. These employees talk about the quality of the company itself, the values the company endorses, the way in which their lives are enhanced because of it.

Starbucks recognizes competitors can replicate products, but they can’t replicate people. That’s precisely why the company focuses so much attention on the employee experience, because it is employees who create meaningful connections with customers. Many marketers view employee relations as a job solely for human resources—they see employees as tools. But employees—happy, rewarded employees—can work wonders for the company’s marketing efforts. There is no better spokesperson for a company, product, and brand than someone who is happy with his job and respected by his employer and peers. A happy employee will in turn, make customers happy.

Starbucks makes its mission statement a living document through encouraging all partners to question any activity they believe the company is doing that goes against company values. This process is called Mission Review, and each month around 200 submissions are received by Starbucks from interested and concerned employees. Every submission gets a response, many of which get more than that. They get action. This not only gives each employee a voice in the company, but it keeps the company on track and in line with its original values. It lets employees know the company is listening and reacting to them.

One of the first lessons learned when new employees join Starbucks is that the company values passionate followers more than it does passionate leaders. By no means does Starbucks dismiss the importance of leadership. Leadership is important to the company’s success. But followership is just as vital.

At Starbucks, it’s believed bad bosses hurt the company far more than bad business decisions. When Starbucks employees leave the company, they do so far more often because of a bad manager than they do because of bad business management.

Products do not create brands, people create brands. It’s the people that matter more in creating a brand than the product itself. And Starbucks places a tremendous emphasis on hiring the right people to deliver exceptional products and meaningful experiences to customers.

When hiring employees for store-level and corporate-level positions, Starbucks looks for the following upstanding “people” qualities in each candidate: genuineness, conscientiousness, knowledge, and involvement.

In many ways, Starbucks still behaves like the upstart coffee company it was. They’ve managed to keep the start-up mentality alive by not succumbing to the Three Cs of Complacency, Conservatism, and Conceit. These “Three Cs” have derailed many a successful, growing business.

As businesses grow, so does the need to hire more people to handle the increasing workload. Eventually all growing companies face the situation of needing to combine the talents and perspectives of long-time (old-school) employees with those of recently hired (new-school) employees. Integrating this influx of new hires with long-timers has been one of the greatest challenges Starbucks has faced in growing its business.

“It is better to hire people who can get you to where you want to be than people who profess to have been there before.” That’s brilliant advice from Guy Kawasaki, old-school Apple Computer employee, as written in his book, The Macintosh Way. It is also highlights the Starbucks’ way to hiring right.

Starbucks places more importance on hiring people who have a mix of verve, candor, can-do spirit, and a highly likeable personality than they do on people who have years of experience.

Coasting will not get you far at Starbucks. Your career will stagnate. You will get left behind. You will eventually get ejected.

The most successful Starbucks partners realize participation is the price of admission to meetings and conferences. When Starbucks partners choose to accept an invitation to a meeting, they choose to come prepared to make a worthwhile contribution. They choose to offer their insights. They choose to ask the tough questions. They choose to participate.

What happens when you gather a roomful of passionate, and sometimes highly caffeinated, overachieving Starbucks partners in a meeting? You get healthy dialogue.

Starbucks has a peaceful business veneer, but behind closed doors in any of its more than 100 conference rooms at its Seattle headquarters, you will witness heated and contested conversations.

Starbucks would rather have these difficult conversations take place in conference rooms than in hallways. That’s because Starbucks’ consensus-building, decision-making culture requires that all issues from all angles be discussed before a decision is reached. This cannot happen in a hallway conversation between only a few people.

Whenever Starbucks undergoes a major corporate reorganization and redraws its organizational structure, which usually happens once every 18 months, executive management does two things. First, Starbucks executives remind corporate employees that while their proverbial cheese has been moved, employees must not hem and haw about the changes. Instead, Starbucks’ employees should scurry about and sniff around to adjust to the new organizational alignment.

The second thing Starbucks executives do is remind employees that no matter what organizational and departmental management changes take place, there is only one boss that truly matters—the customer.

Many overachieving Starbucks partners measure their comparable job performance. They do it in the same way businesses and financial analysts look at year-over-year comparable sales growth (comp sales) to gauge the vitality of a business and evaluate its future growth prospects.

By comparing their current job performance in relation to their job performance of the previous year, these overachieving Starbucks partners are able to better evaluate their contribution in the workplace to determine if their overall performance is trending positively or negatively.

Do you think all the posters, banners, brochures, and other marketing signage you see in Starbucks are meant solely for customers? Think again, as marketing at Starbucks impacts more than just customers . . . it also impacts employees.

Starbucks doesn’t view profit and the maximizing of profits as business strategy. The company views profit as an outcome. The mindset at Starbucks is, profit happens as a direct result of doing everything else right.

Starbucks Tribal Knowledge tells us the only worthwhile way to thrive in today’s hyper-competitive business environment is to set out to change the world with your new business, new product, and or new service. After all . . . that’s what Starbucks did.