Business Wisdom from Drug Dealers – Presentation Recap

One of my favorite presentations from the January ProductCamp Austin was given by John Moore. The presentation was provocatively titled, “Business Wisdom from Drug Dealers”,  but this was not a link bait trick. John delivered “the goods” while using the movie American Gangster to derive lessons that applied to the legitimate business world.

John not only found a way to creatively share some real world advice (based on his experience marketing for Starbucks) but also found a way to entertain a standing room only crowd.

After the presentation, I caught up with John and asked him to share one of the points of his talk,

John has the full presentation on Vimeo and Brian Massey put together a great infographic on the talk. You can find more from John on his outstanding blog, Brand Autopsy.

On a side note, John was the first presenter that I have ever seen who did not panic when his laptop crashed. Without missing a beat, he reached into his backpack and pulled out a second laptop. What would have been disastrous for most talks wasn’t even a speed bump for John.  Very impressive!

Starbucks Via – Instant Success, Long Term Failure?

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Kellogg Professor Tim Calkins has a great take on his blog about the new StarBucks Via instant coffee.  Tim’s take is that the coffee is not bad but that it seems to run counter to the Starbuck’s brand experience.  Tim explains,

Starbucks has long worked to embrace the coffee experience, the crisp beans coming from exotic lands all over the world, the grinding noise, the wonderful aroma, the ritual of precisely measuring coffee and water and then waiting for it to brew.  Starbucks has taught us that coffee isn’t just coffee.  There is much, much more to it.

On the surface, you could argue that instant coffee makes sense for Starbucks, right?  You can definitely see how the case for it was argued from a product perspective:  Starbucks sells coffee, instant coffee is a big market, Starbucks should sell instant coffee.   At least it is a coffee product and not something as crazy as Burger King’s “Flame” body spray (who doesn’t want to smell like a whopper).

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