Your Starbucks Idea is not the point
My Starbucks Idea was recently heralded as a paragon of relevant community-based advertising, to which DLB intrepidly rebuts: "A paragon of what exactly?"
David Armano recently wrote some new lyrics to an old tune at Advertising Age, bemoaning the continued reliance on flashy microsites, and appealing to a policy of community activity as the most effective – however unglamorous – strategy for building brand loyalty.
When YouTube arrived on the scene, we responded by putting our TV spots on it or – better yet – creating spots that looked like they were made by amateurs. Little did we know that the real action happens in the comments.
He appeals in the article to the My Starbucks Idea idea, which in turn appeals to Starbucks loyalists: "You know better than anyone else what you want from Starbucks. So tell us. What's your Starbucks Idea? Revolutionary or simple—we want to hear it."
So that's the big idea. Ask people what you should do with your business, and let them vote and discuss their answers. This is, in fact, the big internet idea (qua advertising) in general, at least as it's developed over the past five or ten years. But, looking at the My Starbucks Idea site, I started to wonder if it was really working at all.
| Tagged with: | Advertising, Advertising Age, Branding, Ideas, Microsites, Niccolò Machiavelli, Pure Existential Terror, Social Media, Starbucks, Trends, Web 2.0 |
