Hightower Lowdown

At last, a powerhouse competitor has challenged the market dominance of the corporate coffee colossus, Starbucks. The name of the upstart competitor? Starbucks.

Well, actually, you won't find the corporate name on the challenger, and that's the point. With its own sales declining as more and more caffeine consumers reject the cookie-cutter corporate climate that the coffee chain epitomizes, Starbucks is launching a new line of stores that jettisons its own brand-- no Starbucks sign outside, no logos inside, and none of that stuff that makes each Starbucks store just like the 16,000 others in the chain.

The new shops strive to be the anti-Starbucks, with funky stylings and localized names that disguise the corporate presence behind them. The idea, says Starbucks' senior vice president of global design, is to give the stores "a community personality."

This is such a clumsy and transparent fraud that it's doomed to be an embarrassing failure. Start with the fact that genuine coffee shops already have "a community personality" --and none of them has a senior vice president of global design.

Corporate chains can't do "community," "funky," "cool," or "independent" --because they're not. Starbucks even deployed a gaggle of market researchers into local Seattle coffee shops last year, to gather intelligence on what constitutes "community personality." The spies didn't exactly fit in--they arrived as a group, poked around and jotted notes in folders labeled, "Observation." Then they'd leave without buying a single cup of coffee!

Starbucks can hide its name, but its corporate nature will always out.