Starbucks have been going string for years. Is it really that drastic of a change. We take you back in time slightly.
Apparently Starbucks have been around for 40 years. Their brand has managed to grab our attentions mainly because its in your face on the high streets. Over the years there seems to be a lot of changes to the structure of the organisation. Through the takeover and Howard Schultz joining the company in 1982, as Director of Retail Operations and Marketing, the brand used the first brown logo.
The company is named in part after Starbuck, Captain Ahab’s first mate in the novel Moby-Dick, as well as a turn-of-the-century mining camp (Starbo or Storbo) on Mount Rainier. According to Howard Schultz’s book Pour Your Heart Into It: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time, the name of the company was derived from Moby-Dick, although not in as direct a fashion as many assume. Gordon Bowker liked the name “Pequod” (the ship in the novel), but his then creative partner Terry Heckler responded, “No one’s going to drink a cup of Pee-quod!” Heckler suggested “Starbo”. Brainstorming with these two ideas resulted in the company being named for thePequod’s first mate, Starbuck.
In 1992 the large global company was gaining more trademarks and intellectual copyrights in many different companies. Due to past controversy and potential global capitalisation, Starbucks changed their logo and even covered up the navel to make it a sleeker and bolder visual. This change was already developed once but still resembled the original more. The one thing that seems more distinctive that most people forget is that over brown coffee stained brown was scrapped for what can only be assumed as being an ego-friendly and much greener green. This colour scheme change is what I believe is the key difference that allowed this brand to be noticed. From a designers point of view this opened the doors to many other possibilities as this logo can now be used on white, which is clearly a designers dream.
So I guess this brings us to the next stage where we visit the new logo for 2011 onwards. This logo simply develops and evolves the brand into another era by making things simpler. We all know the lady in the illustration. So why not just show that. After all, McDonald’s now only keep the golden arches as their logo, its the same principle that helps push global brands that bit further.
This article was spring boarded news from the Drum website.