Starbucks Reserve Roastery & Tasting Room is part-brand story, part-flagship retail, part-working roastery, and a complete brand experience.  Take a look at this video audit and analysis to see why this special store might be Starbucks next big move to make specialty coffee more mainstream.

DLYohn Brand Experience Brief: Starbucks Reserve Roastery & Tasting Room from Denise Lee Yohn on Vimeo.

other Brand Experience Briefs and related posts:

Starbucks 3.0 Caffe Bene Zappos corporate office A Tale of Two Re-brands:  Syfy and Starbucks

transcript:

It’s been called the “Willy Wonka of coffee.” “The Disney World of coffee.” “Retail for the 21st century.” I’m talking about Starbucks Reserve Roastery & Tasting Room, a very special Starbucks location in the Capitol Hill area of Seattle, Washington. This brand experience brief takes you inside the 15,000 square foot store.

Actually calling it a store is really an understatement. It’s practically a shrine to coffee and it is comprised of different areas where you can worship, I mean, experience coffee. And the location is a working roastery, where coffee is produced in small batches for sale there and in other Starbucks’ locations.

There is a huge retail area sells coffee and everything related to it — cups, presses, makers, servers — plus you can browse all sorts of unique cultural paraphernalia including prints, vinyl records, and vintage souvenirs.

There are two bars where you order and get your product. On the main level, you can order special coffees, coffee drinks, coffee flights, pastries, and recommended pairings of coffee and chocolate. The wraparound bar is lower than the ones at most Starbucks so you can see the baristas preparing your order as well as the beautiful Clover machines and other cool coffee preparation gadgets. I ordered a Mole Mocha and it was exquisitely served in a dark cup with the Reserve star logo. The lower level features a set up more like a regular bar with a bartender serving up drinks to patrons sitting on bar stools.

The Roastery & Tasting Room appeals to all five human senses — plus some. First, there is so much to see. Even before you enter the place, coffee beans adorn the sidewalk. Once inside, you’re greeted with a sign explaining the concept — and other messages are scattered throughout the space. The store design retains many of the original features of the early 20th-century building, including the terrazzo floors and ceiling beams. There is a 32-foot-high Copper Cast where coffee beans are stored, the open roastery where you can watch the coffee being produced, and all sorts of equipment.

The sense of sound is appealed to in the way the coffee beans lightly rattle as they make their way through the pipes in the ceiling and fall into glass silos above the bar. And there’s the clacking of an old-fashioned train-station flap display board which changes every time a new batch is being roasted.

Paper menus as well as unique furniture and fixtures deliver on the sense of touch and the smell of fresh ground coffee beans wafts through the space.

For taste of course the freshly roasted and prepared coffee is distinctive and the sides like a Key Lime Meringue Pie are delicious. If you’re hungry for something more substantial, a unit of Tom Douglas’ pizzeria, Serious Pie, is located in the space.

Beyond these senses, the place also appeals to community and knowledge with its library of more than 200 books related to coffee and a place for meeting. And friendly, aproned employees stationed make you feel welcome and answer questions.

This is truly high end retail — my small drink was $6.50 and an eight-ounce package of coffee beans sells for between $13 and $50 — so it doesn’t seem to have the same mass appeal of a regular Starbucks. But when I visited on a weekday afternoon, the place was packed with regulars working and meeting as well as tourists. And I remember when Starbucks first opened and paying $4.00 for a coffee drink seemed expensive, so this could indeed be the company’s next big move — making specialty coffee more mainstream. It just announced it will open a second Roastery & Tasting Room in the heart of New York City’s Meatpacking District in 2018.

The post brand experience brief: starbucks reserve roastery & tasting room appeared first on Denise Lee Yohn.

This post is first part of a two part series, in which I describe how the web is providing you relevant information from the ever swelling ocean of information. 

1. Think of the ‘10 minute’ shower you took this morning. Now think about this – in 2013, we are creating the same amount of data every 10 minutes that we did from the beginning of recorded time until 2003!

2. Imagine you entered a search query on a multibrand flight ticket web-shop to see rates of Amsterdam to Vienna flights for a certain date. How do you feel while the website makes you wait for 15 seconds by displaying ‘one moment please’ before it returns the results?

The above two cases underline two very fundamental aspects that are shaping internet based business ecosystem: we are generating content at an exponentially growing rate, and we expect to have relevant information at our fingertips.

In order to provide us with relevant information from ever swelling ocean of information, companies need to organize new information continually and present relevant information in an easily assimilable way. However, no internet based company has the complete answer to what is the best possible way to do so. And to add to the woes of the companies, the challenge only gets tougher by day as the amount of content grows and our average attention span decreases. It turns out that today the pursuits of companies is a work in progress. Nevertheless, it is worthwhile to take a look at the various strategies that are applied in organizing and presenting information. Below I describe some strategies that I have identified.

Organizing

1. Rated/Tagged by people
The most basic form information organization on internet is based on rating or tagging by people. When people rate an app on Google Play, vote up an answer on Quora, or rate a restaurant on Yelp, they are basically participating in the process of organizing information. When people hashtag their tweets, or fill in details such as location, price and bed-type while posting their apartment on Airbnb, they are once again participating in the process of organizing information. Simple and versatile, rating and tagging are two unsung heroes of internet.

2. Curated by people
There are many websites which enable people to curate content in a way people consider meaningful. 8tracks lets people create and share playlists. Flipboard lets people create and share their own virtual magazines. YouTube lets people create and share their own video channels. The basic idea behind enabling people to curate content is to organize information in chunks that have some sort of ‘soul’, which results from the unique tastes and preferences of the person curating it.

3. Curated by company
Oftentimes internet based companies curate information in way the company considers it to be appealing to its target customers and fitting to its own business objectives. Examples: Amazon’s books, movies, music and games, among other things; and Delivery Hero’s restaurant menus.

4. Tagged/Rated by machine
All of us know how amazing Google Search is. Google’s servers work incessantly to index content from across the web and the process involves advanced forms of tagging and rating. The amount of computing that goes on to enable Google’s super-fast search is unimaginably massive. The search function of many other websites, such as that of a multibrand flight ticket web-shop, is also algorithm driven, but they are of much modest scale and scope.

When it comes to organizing information in a meaningful way, companies apply several strategies in combination to deliver the best possible results to people. Let’s consider an example. As I write this, I am listening to Bonobo’s ‘Stay the Same’ in the playlist ‘Cigarette & cold morning’ on 8tracks. It turns out the playlist creator retrieved the song from SoundCloud. Most probably she searched for the song using the song-title and/or the artist tags. She put together the playlist ‘Cigarette & cold morning’ by selecting songs that suited the theme she was trying to create. She tagged the playlist with words – relax, chill, smoking, morning, french. When I searched for playlists on 8 tracks using the tags – ‘french’ and ‘chill’, I got a list of several playlists. I glanced through the list of playlists, and chose ‘Cigarette & cold morning’ because of several reasons – number of plays and likes were high, the other tags looked acceptable, and the cover art and description were attractive. Interestingly, I was able to glance through the list of playlists, and register information about number of plays and likes, the tags, and the cover art and description within just a few seconds. As we discussed at the very beginning, presenting information in an easily assimilable way, is as important as, organizing information meaningfully.

I discuss some of the strategies that are applied to present information in an easily assimilable way in my next post. Click here to read Part 2/2.

What is your take on doing business in today’s internet based business context? Would you like to add something to the information I presented in the post? I would love to know your views.

To stay tuned with me Follow @nbhaskar888

Monday, May 20, 2013

Global Press Institute Founder Becomes Ashoka Fellow

Fellows are recognized for their innovative solutions to society’s most pressing social problems

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Global Press Institute founder Cristi Hegranes was elected into the Ashoka Fellowship on May 15, 2013.

A coveted honor for social entrepreneurs throughout the world, Hegranes was one of 5 U.S.-based changemakers to become an Ashoka Fellow last week.

A global organization, Ashoka supports those who share qualities traditionally associated with leading business entrepreneurs – vision, innovation, determination and long-term commitment – but are committed to systemic social change in their fields. Ashoka Fellows are recognized for their innovative solutions to some of society’s most pressing social problems.

“We’re thrilled to welcome Cristi into the Ashoka Fellowship,” says Michael Zakaras, a member of Ashoka’s Fellow selection team in the U.S. “Her idea, combined with her leadership, will improve the quality, diversity, and sustainability of international journalism. And by equipping women around the world with the training to report on their communities, GPI will undoubtedly spur important social change in the process.”

Global Press Institute (GPI) is an award-winning, high-impact social venture that uses journalism as a development tool to educate, employ and empower women in the developing world to produce high-quality local news coverage that elevates global awareness and ignites social change.

GPI is building a network of professional women journalists throughout the developing world who earn a fair wage for reporting on their local communities. Their unique coverage of issues overlooked by mainstream media contributes directly to the development and empowerment of their communities, brings greater transparency to their countries, and changes the way the world views their people and cultures. Today, GPI trains and employs 135 women in 26 developing countries.

“It has been an incredible experience to see Cristi help transform the lives of so many women, and to watch them in turn write stories that bring about social change and solve a problem plaguing the global media industry for more than a decade,” says Ryan Blitstein, a member of the GPI board of directors and CEO of Change Illinois. “Even after several years on the board, I am still amazed by the unique model Cristi envisioned, and her tireless efforts to make it a reality.” Blitstein nominated Hegranes for the Ashoka fellowship in 2012.

Hegranes is also the recent recipient of the Grinnell Prize for Social Justice Innovation, a Jefferson Award for Public Service and the Ida B. Wells Award for Bravery in Journalism. After working as a feature writer with Village Voice Media in New York and San Francisco, Cristi founded GPI at the age of 25.

“This is an incredible honor,” Hegranes said of her election to the Ashoka Fellowship. “It is the dream of every social entrepreneur to join this incredible network!”

Hegranes holds a master’s degree from New York University, served as a fellow-in-residence at The Poynter Institute for Media Studies in St. Petersburg and received a Bachelor of Arts from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.

“I am so grateful to the women of GPI around the world,” Hegranes says. “They have given life to this dream and they continuously prove that journalism is a development tool capable of extraordinary change.”

To contact Cristi Hegranes call +011-415-516-7831; email [email protected]

What do Hurricane Katrina, the stock market crash of 1987, and the U.S. federal government shutdown of 2013 have in common? They were all shocks that temporarily impacted U.S. consumers and, as a result, consumer confidence. None of these events, however, led to a recession. As the Consumer Confidence Index® (CCI) has shown over more […]

If you’ve watched TV shows like “Criminal Minds,” you’ve seen FBI agents analyzing crime scenes, searching numerous government databases and interviewing both suspects and witnesses to solve a case.

With advances in technology and new streams of data available to employers on an almost daily basis, it doesn’t take an FBI profiler to figure out who would make the best candidate for a specific job opening. As we spend more and more time online and on our smart phones, we’re generating unprecedented amounts of data, leaving behind digital breadcrumbs that can be mined for talent identification purposes.

New analytics technologies are empowering HR leaders with the data and insights needed to help attract, hire, manage and retain the talent they need to drive business success. By combining internal data with behavioral analytics and other technologies, employers can better predict who would be the best fit for a particular role, and even gain insight into how to elicit that candidate’s best performance.

I recently attended a Harvard Business Review webinar that touched on some of the fascinating ways our digital footprints are being translated into talent scores that can help employers compare large pools of candidates worldwide.

These are some of the interesting points I took away on new methods used in identifying talent:

Mining Facebook “Likes” – According to research conducted jointly by Stanford University and the University of Cambridge, mining Facebook “Likes” using computer-generated algorithms may predict a person’s personality better than most of their friends and family. After analyzing the videos, articles, artists and other items a person “Liked”, the computer was more accurate in identifying psychological traits such as agreeableness and conscientiousness than in-person interactions. While social media analytics can be used to identify traits that may predict a candidate’s suitability for a job, it’s important to note that there are laws and regulations which may govern who should analyze an applicant’s social media profile and who should not.

Tapping internal Big Data – Another interesting concept is that critical benchmarks for talent and performance can be derived from existing organizational data. The premise is that by measuring everything people do at work you can infer how they will perform in the future. For example, an employer can map how groups interact and how ideas spread throughout the organization. The data collected can help identify the most suitable teams for certain projects, and which individuals are essential resources based on their strong connections with colleagues.

Applying gamification – When taking assessment tests, the user experience can be shortened or jazzed up by applying techniques from the video game industry. For example, companies like VisualDNA profile people using visual personality quizzes which reveal psychological traits such as openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. The quizzes couple questions with images of people doing things to trigger a rapid emotional reaction from a participants’ subconscious to reveal their personality makeup. Keep in mind that it is a best practice for employers to ensure that any tests/assessments applied within their workforce are job-related and do not expose protected characteristic data.

Employing digital profiling – Digital interview providers such as HireVue mine around 80 million data points from a 20-minute interview. The data is then linked to personality and performance analytics to infer relevant talent signals derived from the interview.

While some of these methods may sound a bit futuristic to HR professionals, the employment world is moving toward an environment where intuition and references are but starting points to profile job candidates. One day hiring talent may be as easy as finding the person in the closest proximity with the right skills for the job similar to Google Maps showing what businesses are nearby. In the meantime, employers should continue expanding their evaluation methods in their recruiting activities and, to stay competitive, they should embrace analytics to help better inform their talent management decisions.

This article was written by Amit Jain, Division Vice President, Strategy & Business Development of Major Account Services at ADP.

4 New Ways to Help Analyze Talent Pools

4 New Ways to Help Analyze Talent Pools

TED curator Chris Anderson’s guide to creating talks that are unforgettable. 

A great TED Talk is proof that a carefully crafted short presentation can unlock empathy, stir excitement, spread knowledge and promote a shared dream. Done right, a talk can electrify a room and transform an audience’s worldview. Done right, a talk is more powerful than anything in written form.

The new book, TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking, from Chris Anderson, TED’s curator, and his team of collaborators, explains how the miracle of powerful public speaking is achieved, and equips you to give it your best shot. There is no set formula; no two talks should be the same. The goal is for you to give the talk that only you can give. But don’t be intimidated. You may find it more natural than you think.

About this book, Adam Grant wrote:

This is not just the most insightful book ever written on public speaking — it’s also a brilliant, profound look at how to communicate. If you ever plan to utter a sound, this is a must-read. It gives me hope that words can actually change the world.

The book takes a deep dive into 50 of your favorite TED Talks, unpacking brilliant moments and sharing backstage stories of how they happened.

Proceeds from the sale of this book go to fund TED’s nonprofit mission — including free TED Talks! It’s available in print, as an ebook and an audiobook, and is set to be translated into some 50 languages.

PS: Check this schedule to see if Chris is doing a book reading near you!

As usual, the TED community has lots of news to share this week. Below, some highlights.

Zero Minutes of Fame. In the wake of a mass shooting, the killer’s name is usually plastered all over the news and Internet, a dark 15 minutes of fame with serious consequences: 30% of mass killings are inspired by a previous event. While efforts to reduce media fixation on shooters have had mixed results, the Brady Campaign, steered by Dan Gross, and Ogilvy & Mather are experimenting with a new way to combat this phenomenon in the unlikely form of a web browser plug-in. Announced on April 27, the goal of the Zero Minutes of Fame campaign is to reduce the visibility of the killer and shift focus back onto the victims. Here’s how it works: when you scroll through a major news site or Google search results, the plug-in will replace the killer’s name with the parenthetical “name withheld out of respect for the victims” and replace the killer’s image with an image of the victim labeled with their name. (Watch Dan’s TED Talk)

The illusion of free will. Does free will exist? From deciding what to eat for lunch, what movie to watch, or who to marry, we think we have full, conscious control over every choice we make. But according to psychology professors Paul Bloom and Adam Bear, the brain may trick us into thinking that we consciously made a choice after it had already subconsciously analyzed possible consequences and made a decision for us. Outlining an innovative experiment, Bloom and Bear’s new study cracks open this age-old mystery that could have scientific, moral and philosophical implications. “Perhaps in the very moments that we experience a choice, our minds are rewriting history, fooling us into thinking that this choice—that was actually completed after its consequences were subconsciously perceived—was a choice that we had made all along,” Bear writes in a summary for Scientific American. (Watch Paul’s TED Talk)

Corruption’s threat to civil liberties. Brazil is in the midst of a crippling and unprecedented corruption scandal — and with this turmoil, Robert Muggah and Nathan B. Thompson write in The Boston Globe, comes a potentially permanent threat to civil liberties. Recent incidents include wiretapping citizens not under investigation and seizing private encrypted data. Even social media companies have been pressured: A regional judge ordered telephone companies to block Whatsapp after it refused to release data (a decision overturned on May 4). All of this, Muggah and Thompson say, is not unique to Brazil, but is merely the tip of the iceberg of a global crackdown on Internet freedoms. “It’s a battle playing out across the globe. Brazil is simply one of the front lines.” (Watch Robert’s TED Talk)

Napster for scholarly literature. Everybody’s doing it–illegally downloading academic journal articles, that is. Since journal articles are often only available at prohibitive cost–around $30 per article–the problem of access is often thought to be limited to poor countries, and many academic publishers work to help researchers in these countries gain access. But in an article for Science, John Bohannon shows that researchers and students are increasingly turning to pirated papers, and the trend is not limited to the developing world. Using data provided by Alexandra Elbakyan–the neuroscientist behind the largest online site for pirated articles, Sci-Hub–Bohannon shares surprising facts about who is using the sites and why, raising larger questions about the role of open access in academia. (Watch John’s TED Talk)

Imawarì Yeuta: The House of the Gods. With pink quartz walls and streams that run red, the Imawarì Yeuta is the largest known cave system of its kind, stretching at least 22 kilometers in the Amazon’s isolated tepui mountains. Because of its incredible inaccessibility, the Imawarì Yeuta laid untouched for millions of years until discovered by Francesco Sauro in 2013. Sauro’s team completed their most recent 40-day expedition in April and while they won’t release their discoveries until November, preliminary analyses have turned up unclassified types of bacteria … and based on previous expeditions, it’s likely they’ll turn up a new species or two. (Watch Francesco’s TED Talk)

Health in old age. What’s the secret of people who live healthily into old age? In the largest study of its kind, Eric Topol, a cardiologist and geneticist, analyzed the “Wellderly,” people in their 80s and older who do not suffer from chronic diseases and do not take medication. The surprising results showed that the “Wellderly” didn’t stand out in the genes that contribute to longevity, but in genes “associated with reduced genetic susceptibility to Alzheimer’s and coronary artery disease.” These results suggest that disease-protective genetic factors may be linked to healthy aging. (Watch Eric’s TED Talk)

50,000 strong for autism. On April 21, the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative (SFARI) announced the launch of SPARK, an online research initiative spearheaded by Wendy Chung to study the genes associated with autism, their corresponding biological mechanisms, and how they interact with environmental factors. With the goal to recruit 50,000 individuals with autism and their families, it aims to become the largest autism study ever conducted in the United States. To reach this goal, researchers realized that the traditional way of doing research, where patients come to a single study site to donate blood samples and be evaluated, wouldn’t work. To adapt, they made it possible for participants to join online as well as at 21 sites at medical schools and research institutions around the country. (Watch Wendy’s TED Talk)

What’s new on our bookshelf. Two TED speakers released new books on May 3. Joshua Prager’s new book, 100 Years: Wisdom from Famous Writers on Every Year of Your Life, collects literature’s most poignant quotes about ages 1 through 100. And reporter Janine di Giovanni released The Morning They Came for Us: Dispatches from Syria, a grippingly raw chronicle of her time reporting on the atrocities of war-torn Syria. (Watch Joshua and Janine’s TED Talks)

Have a news item to share? Write us at [email protected] and you may see it included in this weekly round-up.

You might have heard that to succeed, you have to create an “irresistible offer.” But, what is an irresistible offer and how do you create one? My colleague Steve Martile, an expert on how to sign up new coaching clients, offered to share his insights on the topic. Take it…

When I started my business, I was met with skepticism and criticism from those closest to me. “How are you going to save for retirement?” “I heard that 8 out of 10 businesses fail.” “This is temporary, right? Until you get a real job?” Every comment from those well-meaning people…

By Fard Johnmar, Founder, Enspektos, and Advisory Board Member, Society for New Communications of The Conference Board The results from Wave 1 of Enspektos’s State of Digital Health Innovation Study reveal that only 5 percent of health organizations are operating at the highest level of digital health innovation proficiency and expertise. Enspektos fielded Wave 1 […]