Last week, Starbucks unveiled a new logo. This move, as readers of BlogLESS are aware, is done at a brand's own peril. (Further case in point, GapGate.)

Nevertheless, as Olivier Blanchard notes, "Seemingly undaunted by the prospect of having its own logo redesign firebombed across the Twitternets by masses of disappointed customers and fans, Starbucks moved ahead to mark its 40th birthday with such an exercise..."

The result?

The reaction, predictably, has been almost uniformly negative (and occasionally funny).

Logos "Starbucksified", courtesy of The Brand Builder Blog

Starbucks had to anticipate a negative reaction. But did they make a mistake?

I myself am not so sure. The logo retains the iconic Starbucks mermaid, and so visual continuity with the previous logo. Starbucks is hardly in a position to lose brand recognition at this point. Certainly, the new logo doesn't "pop" off the cup as much as the old logo does, but logos aren't comic books.

This design seems to me to be more of a political move -- a landgrab -- than a visual one. The point of logos, or at least one of their major functions, is to communicate the idea of a brand to viewers as quickly and simply as possible. If Starbucks can do that with a green circle, that, to my mind, is a huge gain for the coffee giant in the cultural iconographic Zeitgeist.

Of course, we probably ought to mourn the loss of a culture where we didn't associate a green circle with the Starbucks brand, but that's hardly the kind of thing we ought to expect Starbucks to care about. It's worth visualizing the iconographic payoff that Starbucks is playing for with this redesign:

The Starbucks logo, unevolved (contrast: Google's logo)

Umair Haque's Awesomeness Manifesto has been making the rounds lately, proclaiming that "awesome is the new innovation". Haque's hypothesis is that innovation is too costly. Innovation brought us feature-laden products that quickly fail or are obsolete the next year. Innovation brought us the poor banking instruments that helped cause the financial crisis. Innovation needs to make way for awesomeness.

What is awesomeness? (emphasis mine)

Awesomeness happens when thick — real, meaningful — value is created by people who love what they do, added to insanely great stuff, and multiplied by communities who are delighted and inspired because they are authentically better off. That's a better kind of innovation, built for 21st century economics.

And wouldn't you know it? The first pillar of awesomeness is ethical production:

Innovation turns a blind eye to ethics — or, worse, actively denies ethics. That's a natural result of putting entrepreneurship above all. Buy low, sell high, create value. That's so 20th century. Awesome stuff is produced ethically — in fact, without an ethical component, awesomeness isn't possible. Starbucks is shifting to Fair Trade coffee beans, for example. Why? Starbucks isn't just trying to innovate yet another flavour of sugar-water: it's trying to gain awesomeness.

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.

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