Blog

Doing two projects which are concerned – sometimes obsessively – with mining or finding consumer insights. And happened to re-read the estimable John Simmons’ ‘My Sister’s A Barista’ on Starbucks. At one point Howard Behar, the head ops guy says ‘We’re not filling bellies, we’re filling souls.” Now this is chilling and brilliant at the same time. Forget all this nonsense about the third place and romancing coffee. The ‘consumer insight’ behind Starbucks is that people have empty souls and need them filled up. I think it’s both true, and impossible to own up to.

I wonder if there is a category of taboo insights like this – the ones that are too hot for the insight industry to handle. Plenty in alcohol, where I’m noticing you can’t talk officially about the purpose of alcohol (psychological state change) any more. You have to use euphemisms like bonding or relaxing.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 28th, 2007 at 10:38 am and is filed under The games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.