It didn’t start well.
Even Brian Niccol would surely accept that the optics of his first few weeks at Starbucks back in the summer of 2024 were hardly ideal.
First, there was the messy scrap about wanting to work from home while leading a company insisting its managers return to the office. When your California abode is a thousand miles from headquarters, accusations of executive hypocrisy are inevitable.
Then there was the salary: $96 million for his first four months’ work. That’s 6,666 times more than the median Starbucks barista earns. A multiple that followed him around like a corporate albatross.
And then something unexpected happened. Starbucks’ new CEO started fixing stuff.
He had brought good people with him. Very good people. Tressie Lieberman from Chipotle as chief brand officer. He recruited Cathy Smith, the former CFO of Target and Walmart International, to run finance. He installed new leadership across all his stores.
And he brought brutal simplification. At Taco Bell, Niccol had learned that complexity kills. At Chipotle, he perfected the art of cutting corporate noise. His predecessor at Starbucks, Laxman Narasimhan, had unveiled a strategy called “Triple Shot Reinvention with Two Pumps.” When asked about it, Niccol was characteristically blunt: “I don’t know what that means.”
He replaced it with three words: “Back to Starbucks.”
Say what you mean, mean what you say
It’s here where Niccol and his team have particularly excelled. Not just simplifying operations but articulating the brand’s very reason for being. Consider the old mission statement: “With every cup, with every conversation, with every community—we nurture the limitless possibilities of human connection.” Overwritten. Vague. It reeks of the overstated era of Big Positioning in which so many marketers lost the strategic plot.
Too many brands are run by people who think positioning is an end in itself—one that requires a big societal purpose followed by a verbose set of statements and concepts. Positioning became a PowerPoint deck of overly complex ideas.
It has to be simpler than that. Tighter. Humbler. Even the biggest brand has only a few of its consumers’ brain cells to operate with. Positioning became messy rather than the means to a more simple, prosaic end: salience and differentiation.
Niccol’s new position took less than a paragraph and returned the Starbucks brand to Earth: “A welcoming coffeehouse where people gather, and where we serve the finest coffee, handcrafted by our skilled baristas.” When Howard Schultz heard the new positioning, he reportedly did a cartwheel in his living room.
