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Now being served at Starbucks: McCartney and Coffee

Posted in Advertising, Marketing June 6th, 2007 by gabay

Over the last forty years the legendary ‘Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ album has earned its ranking as the sixth biggest selling album of all time - with an incredible 27 weeks at No.1 in the charts. This week, in one day alone, an estimated 6 million people at more than 10,000 Starbucks in 29 countries listened to a continuous loop of Sir Paul McCartney’s 21st solo album, ‘Memory Almost Full’.

The occasion marked a new kind of cross-industry marketing promotion that addresses the switch in traditional record sales from CD to downloads. Yet some may view the venture as an experiment that may not fully pay off the expected dividends for neither the marketing people working for the coffee grinders nor rock rollers.

Missing the charts

As Starbucks’ 533 UK stores are not registered with the Official Chart Company, hundreds of copies of the album will be ineligible for the top 40 UK charts, (Although the company is currently in full swing to rectify the technical snag). That said, any album connected with one of the original Fab Four released just days after the 40th anniversary of the launch of Sergeant Pepper’s, was bound to automatically make a reasonable impression the charts. 

Currently, ‘The Travelling Willburys Collection’, featuring George Harrison, is around the top of the Amazon.co.uk chart, with ‘Memory Almost Full’ hovering at ninth place and still perched just outside the number two and three spots - ‘Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’.

The unlikely lad we all love

McCartney’s brand has always been associated with ‘the local lad who did good’. His life, whilst literally millions of pounds away from that of the ordinary person in the street, still resonates with the ups and downs of modern living. We have seen him dabble in drugs, get married, enjoy success, endure battles and even experience tragic loss. In keeping with consumers’ scepticism of the times, many view this latest partnership as McCartney ‘selling out’ to the faceless brand that, like the aroma of its product, lingers around every street corner in every major city centre.

From Starbuck’s point of view, the move could be viewed as just another push towards swamping the market with the Starbucks brand - which also has its fingers in film distribution.

Excuse me - there’s a Beatle in my coffee

If one of McCartney’s plans for distributing the album was to hearken back to the by gone days when people buying vinyl, would firstly listen to an album in full before buying it, the plan may have skipped a track or two. One of the biggest complaints about the Starbucks release has been that it is often literally too difficult to hear the music over the sounds of clanking coffee cups, buzzing conversations and whirring cappuccino machines.

Back in 1960s McCartney sung of what he would do when he was sixty-four.  Presumably one of his anticipated pursuits would have been to sit down at his local ‘greasy spoon’ with a nice mug of steaming tea and a bacon sandwich. With his sixty-fifth birthday just a few weeks away and the Knight dips a granola bar into on a Tall Skinny Latte, he must surely chew over over how things have certainly changed.
 
 
Jonathan Gabay
www.brandforensics.co.uk