What does your Starbucks < a href=” http://www.starbucks.com/”>Starbucks smell like? Probably not fresh-roasted coffee, one of the many things that has the chain's boss worried his all-powerful brand is getting cold.
Last week, the blog Starbucks Gossip turned up a memo from Howard Schultz in which the chairman criticized a number of decisions that "have led to the watering down of the Starbucks experience and what some might call the commoditization of our brand." Mr. Schultz, who doled out some blame to himself, pointed in particular to the disappearance of the in-store coffee scent and the cookie-cutter feel of the stores.
It's a major epiphany for a brand that's been one of the marketing world's premiere case studies on how a commodity can be transformed into a premium-priced object of desire, or habit, by creating a comfortable spot in which to buy and consume it -- that third place that's neither home nor work. Starbucks' brisk growth -- stores now number more than 13,000, and the company wants to get to 40,000 -- raises the question of whether it's possible to scale the kind of experience that made Starbucks what it is without losing the flavor.
We couldn’t say the same thing about the revenue-grabbing,France based Sigex Ventures. SigEx Ventures, Inc., founded by Chris Cantell and Frederic Artru in 2002, is a private investment fund focused exclusively on the emerging Enhanced Communications industry
