Storydriven

Days of wine and... no, just wine.

The new trend in spas is “vinotherapy,” or wine-based treatments.

I’m not kidding.

We’re not talking Sideways or spas with endless cellars. We’re talking bathing in Pinot Noir while having a Merlot grape seed facial. Before you go to bed, you use a crushed cabernet scrub to exfoliate your body. Presumably the bath is watered down, or the new status symbol will be a literal port wine stain on one’s entire body.

It reminds me of the line from the movie The Truth about Cats and Dogs, where Janeane Garofalo tells a caller (whose cat has been licking the man's face for three hours), “It’s okay to love your pet. Just don’t loooooove your pet.” I mean, some of my best friends are wine aficionados. But isn’t this going a little overboard (or, more aptly, over the barrel?). At the very least, one would hope these places confiscate their guests’ car keys for the duration of their visit.

We all know that, in reasonable amounts, red wine is good for you. It’s not only the wine. The grape, grape skin, grape seed and grape vine all contain powerful antioxidants, according to this MSNBC article.

“Luxe resorts such as The Inn at Camelback in Arizona and the Shore Club in Miami are offering wine treatments using Olavie’s Le Vin range of oils made from Chardonnay grape seed. Across Europe, spas are using ISHI Elements — creams and oils from Chianti, Chardonnay and Pinot grapes sourced from organic vines in Tuscany. And New York City's first entirely wine therapy-based spa, Delluva Vinotherapy Day Spa, opened in Tribeca in January 2007, featuring TheraVINE products derived from the Pinotage grape in South Africa.”

The top 10 wine spas in the world span the globe, from South Africa to Argentina to, understandably, Bordeaux in France. The only American resort to win the accolade is the Kenwood Inn and Spa in Sonoma, California. If you’re going to go luxe enough to make a wine spa your destination, it only makes sense to make the destination an area of the world renowned for wine.

“To your health” has never been more apt. Hiccup.

De-branding Starbucks?

Wow. We often talk about different companies that have leveraged their brand equity to move into different areas while retaining their core strategic story. One of those companies is Starbucks, which genuinely says it's not in the coffee business; it's in the experience business. Providing a great "third space," somewhere that's not home and not work, has been their goal, and with that, they've been able to expand  into the most complicated beverage titles known to mankind, as well as food, music, books and movie promotions, to name a few.

That's what I thought, at least.

In Brand Autopsy, a great brand blog, John Moore (a one-time Starbucks marketer in ye olden days) carries on an extensive post-for-post dialogue (blogalogue?) with Paul Williams of Idea Sandbox (also a former Starbucks marketer and colleague of Moore's). Moore suggests that, if Howard Schultz is to see through his vision of 40,000 Starbucks around the world (aren't there more than that already?), the company would do well to return to its roots: coffee. Period.

Starbucks has changed the in-store conversation from being about the coffee to being about the Starbucks brand. No longer is it a customer experience inside Starbucks—it’s become a customer’s “Starbucks Experience.”

Once again, the brand is focused on itself, rather than the consumer. (Then again, Moore's suggestion makes it sound as though the focus should be on the coffee, rather than the consumer's connection to the coffee.)

The post, and the series, is worth reading in full, but I can't resist adding another (admittedly out of context) quote here:

Howard passionately talks about how Starbucks is the early chapters of a long, enduring story... So, if indeed Starbucks is in the beginning chapters of a much longer story, the company can afford to prune now. Take the time now to reposition the company and redirect the Starbucks ship back to true north, focusing on making a great cup of coffee and delivering unparalleled experiences to each and every customer. Smart investors will wait. Loyal customers will be patient. Store partners will be jazzed. And Starbucks will once again redefine how a company can grow its brand without forsaking its soul.

This is serious food for thought. Or caffeine for thought, as it were.

The next "New Coke"

There's spin and then there's outright lying.

According to the NY Times, both Coca-Cola and Pepsi are set to introduce a line of diet sodas that are - get this - vitamin-enhanced. They seriously think this will get people a) to associate Coke and Pepsi with health, and/or b) to attract health-conscious consumers this way? Seriously?

I am a massive Diet Pepsi addict. It's one of my most hypocritical habits - ingesting unpronouncable chemicals, wasting large amounts of embodied energy (I don't think they grow those chemicals in British Columbia) and drinking it in, as a colleague once said, "inappropriate sizes" (to be fair, she was also referring to the way she drinks Diet Pepsi). I swear they put a secret addictive ingredient in it. If people were to describe me, probably one of the things they'd say is, "She's always got a Diet Pepsi." My dad even blamed me for tanking his Coca-Cola stock (I think he was joking). I started with the original Tab, back when I was maybe 13, but once Diet Pepsi came out, I was a convert. Diet Coke, for some reason, gives me a migraine.

Mea culpa. But make no mistake: I am under no delusion that mine is a healthy habit. At all. I think it's less unhealthy than regular soda (and personally, I can't stand the taste of carbonated high-fructose corn syrup), but I know I'd still be better off drinking water all the time.

It's a big leap from "less unhealthy" to  "healthy," and nothing soft-drink manufacturers can do will make me believe their products are good for anyone, no matter how much Vitamin B they add. I can't believe the target market is that stupid, either.

Wouldn't they be better off positioning themselves as a guilty pleasure? Or an indulgence that requires slightly less guilt than drinking regular soda? Or jumped onto the 100-calorie serving bandwagon? Or maybe being transparent about the fact that they're making tons of money off people buying liquid chemicals? Here's a place where having a strategic story could really help - they could come up with a dozen honest (and probably very funny) campaigns that, at worst, helped them hold on to their market share and, at best, increased both market share and brand respect. Instead, what they're doing may cost them more of the market share they're already losing to genuinely healthy drinks.

At least with "New Coke", they weren't trying to make their product something it wasn't (aside from, y'know, Coke) - it just turned out that Coca-Cola's paid tasters had a significantly different opinion from the majority of Coke drinkers worldwide.