Last updated on September 8th, 2017 at 10:39 pm

That’s the question that Starbucks is asking itself right now, as they are experiencing both success and problems with their heavily advertised new Pike’s Place Coffee product. According to this article, Starbucks is garnering increased sales from the new, milder coffee. However, they are facing a backlash from their strongest customers and evangelists who do not like the deviation from Starbucks’ signature strong coffees. With Starbucks facing the need to close stores for declining customer visits and “under performance’, the issue of customer loyalty is an issue to which Starbucks should be paying very close attention.

It is believed that the new mild product was invented to deal with the challenge presented by the move into coffee products by McDonald’s and Dunkin Donuts. However, the customer backlash has forced the company to return the stronger coffees to their menu.

This chain of events brings us back to two issues we have discussed previously: the need to keep from over-expanding beyond the core values of the brand and the fact that business decisions which may seem right, but that anger your core customers, are not always the best decisions. These two concerns are interrelated in many respects, as it is more often than not the deviation from the core values of the brand that cause problems with the strongest advocates of your brand.

That is the case here. One of the core values of the Starbucks brand is that they make strong coffee. By bringing in a weaker brand of coffee (deviating from the core value) to appeal to new customers at the expense of those who currently support the brand (alienating the advocates), Starbucks managed to hit both of the issues which we are discussing here.    They did eventually fix the issue, in part, by bringing back the stronger coffee, but the fact that they were not cognizant of the problem in the first place is still an issue.

The reasoning behind Starbucks’ original decision brings us back to the main subject of this post, over-extension of a brand.  Starbucks was  trying to be the perfect coffee place for everyone, but in aiming for that goal deviated too far from what they do best.  There’s a similar situation looming at Burger King.  The company announced that it would be experimenting with a new, healthy Kid’s Meal consisting of Macaroni and Cheese with apple slices as opposed to the traditional burger and fries.  Although this does not stray as far from the core values of Burger King as the Starbucks example, it is still a departure from them.  As a general rule, people do not want to go to fast food restaurants like Burger King for healthy alternatives, they go for the burgers.  By definition, a healthy alternative at a fast food place is a contradiction of terms.

So what should be taken from all this?  As we’ve discussed before, expansion is always an admirable goal.  But it cannot come at the expense of the company’s core values and strongest evangelists.

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