Vinagre y Lera (2008)

One drizzly November morning in Portland, Oregon, I met Jerome Conlon for coffee at one of the city’s two-hundred-plus Starbucks

stores. Though one wouldn’t guess it from his scowling, brooding de-meanor, Conlon happens to be an established authority on the psycho-logical nuances of this exact social activity: getting coffee. When I first shook his hand, Conlon wore a huge, dark trenchcoat and a facial ex-pression that seemed to imply that his mind contained ideas no other human has ever conceived; later on, that look was in full bloom when he told me, “I know more about the social role of coffee than anyone alive.”

Now in his late forties, Conlon has spent his career plumbing the depths of the consumer brain to uncover not only what people want to buy, but how they want to feel when they buy it. During much of Nike’s growth spurt in the eighties and nineties, he was its one-man market research department, responsible for keeping marketers and designers aware of the consumer’s mood toward the company. When teens began seeing Nike as soft and institutional in the early nineties, for example, Conlon raised the alarm, spurring the company to launch an edgy and controversial ad campaign that featured the basketball star Charles Barkley declaring “I am not a role model.” In 1996, Con-lon left Nike to join his former boss, Scott Bedbury, at Starbucks as the company’s first head of “consumer insights.” His assignment was to find out exactly what people want in a coffeehouse.

Starbucks badly needed the help. Despite the company’s massive popularity and the burgeoning espresso craze, a significant obstacle en-dangered its future: a lack of knowledge about its customers’ desires. By the midnineties, Starbucks had a solid lineup of drinks and a strong ser-vice reputation, but the company struggled with its image — specifically, in outfitting itself to attract its target customers: high-income urban professionals aged eighteen to forty-five. The company wanted to be an ideal haven, a quintessential “third place,” yet its stores hardly encour-aged lingering. Efficiency, not coziness, was the goal. Store walls often blared the loud colors of the Italian flag, and customers had to perch on a piece of furniture nicknamed the “eight-minute stool.” “With the stool, there was no place to put your feet, so your legs dangled and your

The Siren’s Song

ass fell asleep after about eight minutes,” Bedbury recalled. “Starbucks definitely wasn’t going out of its way to make people comfortable. It was all about volume and capacity.”

The solution was to find a uniform image around which Starbucks could shape itself, and it was Conlon’s job to quiz consumers and pro-vide the general parameters this image should take. Bedbury gave him broad instructions for this mission, which he christened the “Big Dig”:

go anywhere, talk to anyone, read anything — just find out what people consider the best interaction they can possibly have with coffee. Thus, Conlon embarked on a nine-month-long, multiphase investigation into the metaphysics of coffee. He scoured the literary landscape, from the writings of eighteenth-century London’s coffeehouse denizens to the musings of the beats. He studied coffee’s cameos in art, music, and film. Bedbury and Conlon interviewed hundreds of coffee drinkers, sorting their responses according to their “need states” and “lifestyle segments.” (Or, as Bedbury later jargonized the process in his book, A ­ New­ ­Brand ­World, “We probed the conflicted lexicon of the coffee cat-egory to ensure that we would be able to establish a clearer dialogue with coffee drinkers on all levels.”)

They were struck immediately by the strong emotional pull the in-terviewees felt toward their daily jolt. “When these people locked into the focus groups and we told them they had to spend two hours talking about coffee, they all groaned,” Bedbury told me. “Then at the end we had to kick them out of the room — they had so many associations and recollections about it that they just kept on talking.” Conlon asked some of the participants to close their eyes and go into a “dream state,”

then describe what they would see, taste, hear, touch, and smell in the greatest coffee experience imaginable. “We did over a dozen focus groups, and all of them told us about the same place,” Conlon said. “It was almost as if they’d all watched the same movie.”

That movie must have been a chick flick, because — to the dismay of the company’s coffee-focused hard-liners — the interviewees talked very little about the coffee itself, but quite a bit about feeling­s and

atmosphere. Most consumers didn’t really care about coffee minutiae like flavor profiles and acidity, as long as the product tasted decent; in-stead, they craved a sense of relaxation, warmth, and luxury, all within the safe coffeehouse social sphere. “The coffeehouse, when it’s as good as it gets, is much like a public living room,” Conlon explained. People wanted to have that coveted coffee experienc­e, an idealized version of the much-loved “coffee break.” And they were willing to pay for it.

To the Starbucks brass, this was shocking news. Company execu-tives already knew that few customers wished to sit down in the stores (only two or three out of every ten), and even fewer said a word to any-one but the barista, so it was puzzling that people would crave a cozy social atmosphere above all else. But the reality was this: for those seeking a refuge from the world, the cup of coffee they bought was re-ally just the price of admission to partake of the coffeehouse scene. As Conlon knew, café dwellers through the ages had endured absolute swill for the privilege of loitering in the right setting. The coffee wasn’t the point — the place was. “The consumer is spending his money for a total experience,” said Harry Roberts, the longtime Starbucks market-ing executive. “They may not be able to articulate that, but it’s the truth.” Even momentary contact with a soothing environment was im-portant to harried office workers taking a latte to go; it was relaxation by osmosis.

In later years, Starbucks took this kind of research on customer de-sires to new heights — it even paid one market research firm to hypno-tize “hip young people” and find out the deep-rooted reasons why they so often derided the company as “corporate coffee” — but the over-arching message was clear. Starbucks needed to concentrate on its cus-tomers’ feelings. Soon, planning began on what the company dubbed the “Starbucks Experience,” a phrase one sees in most every press re-lease, pamphlet, and interview associated with the company today. In fact, if you read a comment by a Starbucks employee and he or she doesn’t mention the “Starbucks Experience,” the phrase “surprise and delight,” or the company mission statement, something has gone

The Siren’s Song

horribly wrong. Because once Starbucks figured out what its customers wanted, it never went off-message again.