Breakfast & Electronic Unnovation

Unnovation is a fantastic term coined by Harvard Business writer Umair Haaque. It is described as the process of innovation that fails to create authentic, meaningful value.

I believed Starbuck's idea to introduce healthy, hot breakfast pairings to be somewhat innovative. I travel extensively and always have difficulty finding a lighter breakfast, a combination of coffee and a small sandwich at the corner Starbucks seems like a great idea. And for Starbucks, it also helps them compete with the lower cost McDonalds and Dunkin Donuts offerings. So, a win all around. Except when you can't actually buy it!

Here's where the unnovation comes in. Because of Starbuck's franchisee agreements the highly marketed breakfasts are not available in all stores, in fact, they're not available in most stores! Why? Well low cost breakfasts would compete with the certain franchisee's existing food businesses, to whit the customer cares not one iota. So, after schellping to a Starbucks a few times and finding that the items are not available the customer (in this case me) gives up on the concept and returns to the competition. And Innovation becomes Unnovation. Corporate policies undermine the very products the company is introducing to stave off the demise of it's tradiitonal business.

Next up for unnovation is Radio Shack. "We're contemporizing the way we want people to think about our brand" was a quote from Lee Applbaum, Chief Marketing Officer. The contemporizing? Changing the name to "The Shack" Not introducing innovative new products or ideas, not implementing new processes, nothing, just a name change. In fact the change doesn't even go that deep, the URL is still www.radioshack.com and apart from a cringely awful online marketing campaign (beware if you click it really is that bad) that's where it begins and ends.

Now that is Unnovation.

More beating Up On Starbucks

The latest idea to come out of Starbucks is to start serving smoothies. What this has to do with the core business of selling coffee I'm not quite sure. Emulating Jamba Juice might be a fine idea if Jamba were doing great business, problem is they're not! In perusing the Starbucks customer ideas website I found about 25 voices promoting smoothies, however the replies were resoundingly negative.

Starbucks - still got it wrong?

Less than spectacular earnings warnings coming out of Starbucks show that returning CEO Howard Schultz has a fight on his hands. However, blaming McDonalds & Dunkin Donuts for the company's woes is not going to fix anything. I don't believe that Starbucks customers are leaving in droves to buy their lattes at the fast-food counter, to paraphrase Bill Clinton, "it's the commoditization stupid." Generic stores filled with pricey bric-a-brac, the switch to super-automatic machines (which removes any differentiation) & third party locations with poorly trained staff & lackluster product have all served to undermine the core brand. At least Schultz is trying to remedy this but it may already be too late. The $4 latte genie is out of the bottle & I'm not sure if he'll fit back in there again?

Update : when you enter the search term commoditization into Google, the 4th hit (after dictionary definitions) is Starbucks!

$11,000 or $20, you decide

Starbucks has purchased the manufacturer of the Clover coffee maker, an $11,000 contraption that reputably makes the best cup of joe in the World. The idea is that these will appear in "selected" Starbucks outlets & the New York Times sent out a reporter accompanied by a coffee aficionado to sample the product. Reviews were neutral at best although most of the criticism was aimed at Starbucks roasting techniques rather than the Clover. However, towards the end of the article, this little nugget slipped out "Finally, the French presses arrived. The coffee was comparable to that from the Clover, but between assembling and steeping, a cup of coffee in a French press takes close to 10 minutes to make."

So it seems that at least according to this specialist, the only difference between the coffee from an $11,000 machine & a $20 press was the preparation & clean up time. I've been extolling the virtues of my French Press for years, they're really easy to use and can now save you $10,980 which seems like a great deal!