Generation Bubble

In Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure (1604), Duke Vincentio of Vienna faces a problem of governance that seems cribbed from the worst apprehensions of the World Net Daily crowd. The duke’s subjects have for many years been flouting the city’s laws governing sexual behavior, gittin’  jiggy wid each other right under the duke’s nose; because, as he admits to Friar Peter, the duke in his distaste for affairs of state had “for this fourteen years … let slip” the responsibility of enforcing  these laws. Duke Vincentio has decided to remedy his long neglect. He wishes to see the laws enforced once again.

These laws, “strict” and “most biting,” present “[t]he needful bits and curbs to headstrong weeds,” but for this very reason they also put the duke in a thorny political predicament. Because he failed for so long to hold his subjects to these laws, he recognizes that “['t]would be [his] tyranny to strike and and gall them” with the harsh penalties these laws call for.

So the duke hits upon the time-honored political expedient of deputizing someone to enforce the laws and, more importantly, to draw the inevitable flak. The person Duke Vincentio designates is Angelo, a man outwardly puritanical but freaky between the sheets. To him falls the duty of cooling off the duke’s hot Wieners, which he pursues with zeal. Meanwhile, Duke Vincentio, pretending an embassy to Poland, enters a monastery in order to pose as a friar. Thus disguised, the duke sets about laying a trap for Angelo, whom he wishes to expose as a hypocritical fraud.

The problem Duke Vincentio confronts is a version of the central problem of quantum mechanics, in which the act of observing influences the phenomenon observed. He tells Angelo, “I love the people, / But do not like to stage me in their eyes.”  The duke wants to observe Angelo and others in their real characters, but he knows that were he to try to do undisguised, he’d see not their behavior as he’d like to see them — honest, spontaneous, unguarded — but as they’d behave in his presence. He therefore resorts to donning a friars habit in the hopes that “disguise shall, by th’ disguised, / Pay with falsehood false exacting.”

As if stealing a page from Duke Vincentio’s playbook, Starbucks has likewise elected to throw a disguise around its magnificence. The July 20, 2009 edition of The Guardian reports that

[t]he US coffee chain is rebranding at least three stores in its home town of Seattle under different, locally orientated, names in an initiative dubbed “stealth Starbucks” in the US media.

Necessitating such stealth is a certain waywardness that, much like in Measure for Measure, has sprung up among the coffee-drinking public during the long reign of Starbuck’s double-shot-venti hegemony. But whereas waywardness of Shakespeare’s Viennese consists of wantonness, that of contemporary coffee-drinkers’ involves abstention.

It seems a growing contingent has shown itself unwilling to pony up the premium Starbucks attaches to their elaborate coffee drinks. (You know it’s bad when, as BrandRepublic reports, company CEO Howard Schultz himself admits that “the coffee chain [has] become the ‘poster child’ for excess.”) Duly alarmed by this defection and the dwindling flow of tribute it represents, Starbucks has decided to don a “more bohemian guise featuring live music performances, poetry readings and sales of alcohol as well as hot drinks ” in order to recapture the public’s fealty and shopping dollars. Such a guise goes by the name “community personality” in Starbucks’ corporate idiom.

Café caché: stealth Starbucks go boho to hide brand.

Mother Jones reporter Josh Harkinson fairly captures the sort of confusion Starbucks seeks to sow with its community-personality makeover. He characterizes it as “the Red Scare in reverse,” in which worrying whether “the hipster at the cafe is secretly a communist is … replaced with worrying whether the hipster cafe is secretly a Starbucks.”

The success of Starbucks’ “community personality” makeover remains in question. A cursory survey of the blogosphere, however, suggests that the outlook is not good. “Frankhg” of  Sand Dollar Adventures recognizes Starbucks ploy for what it is: namely, an “attempt to pull the corporate label over our eyes.”

At her eponymous blog, Gladys Santiago adopts a less condemnatory tone. “Essentially, Starbucks is trying to present itself as a neighborhood coffee shop instead of a corporate conglomerate that ruins small businesses,” she observes:

Critics have referred to the shops as “Stealth Starbucks” and while this sort of marketing is rather subversive, we really shouldn’t be surprised that it has emerged. In an environment in which consumers are bombarded with brand messages and have developed a hyper-awareness and distain for perpetually invasive marketing, companies need to soften their approach. Displacing the familiar slogans, and visual cues that are synonymous with a brand may be a risky move, but several marketers are going this innovative route.

She does, however, point out that Starbucks stealth marketing faces a significant obstacle in the highly developed “persuasion knowledge” of its targeted demographic:

Marketing in general has become rather ubiquitous and invasive, which has resulted in the formation of a hyper-aware audience that sees through and ignores most campaign strategies.

The people Starbucks wishes to lure into their newly re-branded, ersatz-boho digs aren’t likely, as the old Italian saying goes, to mistake the habit for the monk. There’s a strong chance they’ll recognize that under such humble fustian moves a familiar despotic form.

But those of a lower persuasion-knowledge quotient might get sucked in à la Angelo of Measure for Measure, especially if the re-branding strategy manages to circumvent the political reservations many folks have about bringing Starbucks their custom. To these people, as John Jay of The Daily (Maybe) so pithily puts it, these re-branded stealth outlets offer “[a]ll Starbucks, but with none of the liberal guilt.”

Foul trade made fair by fair seeming — truly a devilish measure … by any measure.