Speaking of being lost in translation: This campaign has a bit of a language problem, doesn't it? "McCafe" is hard to say -- having three stressed syllables -- and American audiences have almost no experience with diacritical marks, so the acute accent mark on the final e is going to leave some fast-fooders bewildered.
In spite of, or perhaps because of, the diacritical issue, the campaign's general-audience TV spot (DDB Chicago) features ordinary people's daily drudgery being transformed by a McCafe drink, so that "commute," becomes "commute" and cubicle becomes "cubicle." That seems somewhat lame.
In response to the McCafe campaign, Starbucks is pushing back with print ads this week touting the quality of its coffee. It needn't fret its little mermaid head. McDonald's isn't selling coffee so much as caffeinated milkshakes, and the visuals associated with the first round of ads are likely to send dietitians screaming into the night.
What's fascinating to me about all this is the arc of coffee in America. A decade ago, the Starbucks audience was primarily affluent, college-educated progressives, a self-selected clientele of so-called latte liberals. Starbucks imported the notion of cafe society into the United States. It was the promised "third place" between home and work, where one could relax, read, talk and delectify a good cuppa in peace. Starbucks was social without the media.
But soon, in a mysterious alchemy between status and stimulants, Starbucks became prestige coffee, an aspirational beverage. The company, attempting to keep up with the money flooding in, standardized its retail environments, replaced its La Marzocco machines with automatic espresso machines, started to sell breakfast and lunch, and began hawking truckloads of branded merchandise and music.
By February 2007, Starbucks had well and truly sold out. In a notorious memo, Chairman Howard Schultz admitted the company had sacrificed the "romance and theater" of the coffee-shop experience to efficiency and profit. The sites, Schultz lamented, "no longer have the soul of the past and reflect a chain of stores versus the warm feeling of a neighborhood store."
Starbucks failed, in other words, when it became the McDonald's of coffee. It seems only fair, perhaps inevitable, that Mickey D's fall on its big red nose attempting to be the Starbucks of fast-food.
--
dan.neil@latimes.com
