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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
When I first read the other week that Starbucks was encouraging its staff to write notes on customers’ coffee cups such as “you’re amazing” and “seize the day”, I thought it was a joke.
But no. The company turns out to have an entirely serious plan to foster “moments of connection” with patrons that means any hapless purchaser of a caramel brulée latte now risks such an experience.
Customers may also be handed a cup with a smiley face or, if they look familiar, a note saying: “Hello again.” It’s all part of a turnaround strategy hatched by its latest chief executive, Brian Niccol, to boost its sagging sales. Niccol, former head of the Chipotle burrito chain, became Starbucks’ fourth boss in less than three years last year and, for the sake of the 360,000-odd people he employs worldwide, I hope he succeeds.
But I am also pleased that the cup-writing idea is so far confined to Starbucks’ North American operations because I find it hard to imagine that writing these sorts of messages fills one with joy.
For one thing, it is time-consuming and another part of Niccol’s turnaround plan envisages customers being handed their coffees within four minutes.
More irksomely, the messages are insincere. I am generally not amazing and even if I were, how would a stranger behind a counter in Starbucks know?
Likewise, it is possible, though admittedly unlikely, that the next time I’m buying a coffee I have already done my best to seize the day. Either way, I would not need to be urged to do so by someone I do not know.
Niccol’s strategy is based on his fear that some customers, especially Americans, feel as if their Starbucks experience is “transactional”. But a quick, polite, successful exchange of money for goods is exactly the transaction I want when buying a coffee.
It’s much the same if I ever catch a Eurostar train at London’s St Pancras station. When waiting for my train, I want to hear announcements telling me when it has arrived and what platform I need to go to. I very much do not need to hear the corporate slogan Eurostar launched in 2023: “Together we go further.”
So I was not surprised to read a complaint on social media the other week from one regular passenger, Politico journalist Jon Stone, who was dismayed to hear staff reciting the phrase at the end of regular announcements at St Pancras. “Please stop,” he wrote. “It’s incredibly cringe.”
It is indeed, and also annoying. Divining the meaning of burbled station announcements is hard enough. There’s no need to clutter them up with specious corporate blather.
Happily, Eurostar says its staff are not expected or required to utter the slogan. The announcer Stone heard had chosen to include it that day, a spokesman told me. “But there is no extra incentive or repercussion for doing so.”
I am still unsure about a slogan like “together we go further”. You actually go no further on Eurostar, together or otherwise, than wherever your ticket allows.
But at least the idea had a purpose. Eurostar was trying to highlight the fact that its network had expanded to five countries — the UK, France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany.
The same cannot be said for an astonishing piece of marketing wizardry that emerged in Australia last month.
For the past 36 years, the country’s national athletics body has managed to get by with the perfectly sensible name of Athletics Australia. This has the benefit of briefly, simply and accurately conveying what the organisation is and what it does, which is always helpful for a name.
But lo, at the end of January, the body issued a news release to announce it was entering 2025 “with a bold new identity”. Henceforth its name would change from Athletics Australia to Australian Athletics.
“This rebrand isn’t just about a new look,” said chief executive Simon Hollingsworth. “It’s about reimagining what athletics means to Australians.”
This, alas, is gold medal rubbish. On the upside, the move has been a cheering distraction. In fact, I have rarely seen such a daring piece of antipodean marketing since 2015, when the University of Western Sydney declared it was going to become Western Sydney University.
pilita.clark@ft.com
