Not Just Java

With a Little Help From Jim Beam Brands, Starbucks Jumps Into Adult Beverage Market With a Splash of Style

By Patrick Henry

Talk about an auspicious beginning for a new product: capturing — just a few months after the commercial launch — the glass container industry's most notable honor for package design. The distinction belongs to the singular brown bottle that's introducing consumers to Starbucks Coffee Liqueur, a premium alcoholic beverage developed, manufactured, and marketed for Starbucks by Jim Beam Brands.

As the unanimous choice for Overall Packaging Design in the Glass Packaging Institute's 2005 "Clear Choice Awards" program, the Starbucks package impressed the judging panel more strongly than any of the other 111 entries in the biennial competition (See "News" item on page 72). The writer of this article was one of the judges and researched the story after serving in that role. With the benefit of editorial hindsight, it can be reported that the package took the top honor because it succeeded in communicating everything its designers intended it to communicate both as a beverage container and as a branding device.

The package's swift recognition for design excellence stands in contrast to the more gradual pace of the product's development. That process unfolded over several years as Starbucks and Jim Beam Brands took time to be certain that liqueurs and cordials represented a market ripe for a joint venture.

Watchers of the alcoholic beverage industry know that the category is on the upswing. An article in the January 2005 issue of Beverage Business reported that liqueurs and cordials now compete with rum for the number two position nationally in spirits. Overall sales growth in the category rose 7.1% in 2003 with the shipment of more than 19 million cases of domestic and imported product.

Prospects are percolating

Even more encouraging to Starbucks and Jim Beam Brands was market research indicating that a Starbucks patron would be nine times more likely than other consumers to drink a coffee liqueur. Research showed, in fact, that nearly 50% of Starbucks patrons already consumed coffee liqueurs. This was a trend that augured well for the existence of a very large customer base, given that Starbucks' 9,300 worldwide outlets are visited by more about 33 million people every week.

Nevertheless, the partners knew that product and its package would have some heavy lifting to do if Starbucks Coffee Liqueur was to take full advantage of its brand potential. "We wanted to wake the category up," says Kelly Doss, the product's senior brand manager for Jim Beam Brands. That meant introducing a new product with unique brand equities: a Starbucks coffee-flavored drink that would be perceived differently from everything else in its niche.

Ironically, the caffeinated segment of the category is the part that could use a wake-up call. Beverage Business says that while most brands of cordials and liqueurs enjoyed sales increases in 2003, sales of all of the major coffee liqueurs were down or flat that year. Blame an overabundance of choices and fickle tasts — there's always a new Apple-this or Chocolate-that for connoisseurs to experiment with.

Still, Starbucks believed that a premium coffee liqueur product would be an ideal vehicle to support its long-term growth strategy of extending the Starbucks brand into new channels. Nick Davis, a spokesman for the company, says that the product was conceived as "a way to expand the Starbucks experience outside our stores" in the manner of other branded products launched with the help of partnering companies. These successful ventures include Starbucks Coffee Ice Cream, developed in an alliance with Dreyer's Grand Ice Cream, and Starbucks Frappuccino bottled coffee drink, a joint effort with Pepsi-Cola Co.

Davis also notes that in Jim Beam Brands, Starbucks found a partner with an expertise in distilled spirits equal to its own in coffee. Although it's best known for bourbon, Jim Beam Brands is also well grounded in cordials and liqueurs, counting the De Kuyper and Leroux assortments among its family of products.

If they love Starbucks coffee...

Doss says that the package design for Starbucks Coffee Liqueur began to take shape about two years ago in a collaborative process that included the evaluation of proposals from various design agencies. The assignment ultimately went to Lipson Alport Glass Associates (LAGA), a brand and identity consultancy with a portfolio of services that includes package development. Sam Ciulla, managing director of creative, supervised a project team of five graphic designers and structural designers at LAGA's Northbrook, IL, office.

Creative work that commenced in the summer of 2003 led to test marketing in two cities the following summer. Jim Beam Brands and Starbucks announced the national launch in February of 2005, claiming that the test market phase "confirmed what we already knew — Starbucks coffee lovers want this product."

The announcement had nothing to say about the design of the package, but it's clear that partners' confidence is rooted as strongly in the look of the bottle as in the flavor of the beverage inside. The goal from the outset had been to create a package capable of communicating the product's authentic coffee flavor while generating a "high purchase intent" on its own behalf.

This explains, for example, the choice of the bottle's cocktail-shaker shape. The elegant outline is meant to connote sophistication as it deftly cues what the partners hope will be one of the product's chief selling points — its multiple personalities as a straight sipper, a base for mixers, and an ingredient in Mudslides and other complex drink concoctions so favored by the liqueurs-and-cordials crowd.

Ciulla says that the inspiration for the bottle's shape came not just from barware but from the tapering appearance of Starbucks' own paper coffee cups. The LAGA team proposed using these "sleek, simple, streamlined forms" as the basis of what Ciulla describes as a "classic, understated expression of elegance in dark, brown, rich glass." This design approach, with its mix of classic and contemporary elements, also was meant to evoke the brand's "European" air of café culture and coffee-bar ambiance.

One partner is "silent"

Starbucks has a proven track record of creating successful coffee-related products. In the mid-'90s, the company teamed with Dreyer's Grand Ice Cream and Pepsi-Cola Company on two separate projects.

Naturally, everything in this complex agenda of design intentions had to be communicated accurately. But, because Starbucks Coffee Liqueur would be the Starbucks mermaid's first swim into the distilled spirits category, the primary concern was assuring that a consumer's first glance at the bottle left no doubt as to whose beverage it was or how the product was to be used.

That's why the Jim Beam name and logo are as absent from the package as juniper berries are from bourbon. "It's not a bourbon product," says Doss. Minus the brand identification of America's most famous maker of that celebrated tipple, it's at no risk of being perceived as one.

Even the Starbucks branding is understated — not with the intention of downplaying the product's origins, but in the interest of underscoring the package's subtle signals to consumers.

The green-and-white logo, a medallion recessed into the glass about an inch beneath the bottle's shoulder, is only about the size of a $1 coin. In the "Starbucks™ Coffee Liqueur" header that takes the place of a paper label, the brand owner's name is set in the smallest of three letter sizes. The imprinting method for the medallion and the header is applied ceramic labeling (ACL), a process that combines screen printing and baking. The name "Starbucks" appears just once more, on the sloping shoulder — not in two-dimensional ACL, but in palpable sans-serif letters raised from the surface of the glass. Within the amber glass is a liqueur so deeply, richly brown that its coffee flavor almost can be tasted with the eyes.

The result is an effect that poets call synaesthesia: a condition in which one kind of stimulation evokes the sensation of another. The package, in other words, seems to waft the product's identity the way a hot cup of Starbucks scatters its enticing aroma, so that blaring brand statements aren't needed. According to Doss, consumers in test groups liked the minimalist style of the brand design, seeing it as a suave "endorsement" of the product by Starbucks instead of the usual brash proprietary assertion by a brand owner.

No Mexican standoff

Jim Beam Brands' designers protect the heritage of dozens of wine and spirits brands, from Jim Beam Whiskey to Vox Vodka to Wild Horse wines.

A naturally occurring question is whether one of the design objectives was to make the package look as different as possible from the package of the market-leading coffee liqueur product, Kahlua. "Not really," replies Doss. The point, she says, wasn't about reacting to the market image of somebody else's product. It was about making sure that Starbucks customers perceived Starbucks Coffee Liqueur as something with a new and unique set of brand cues: versatility, sophistication, and of course, authentic Starbucks coffee flavor.

Ciulla agrees that the package's primary task is to help the product make a branding statement on its own terms. Kahlua, he says, is an old-school product with an image "steeped in that Mexican tradition." In shaping the visual language of the package, he continues, "we tried to get totally entrenched in the Starbucks brand" and its special appeal to coffee drinkers. According to Ciulla, that's the logic that will make the concept work: "If you love coffee, and if Starbucks is the dominant brand, then they're the perfect people to own the coffee liqueur category."

The road to category ownership does not run through Starbucks retail outlets, as Starbucks Coffee Liqueur won't be sold or promoted in any of those outlets. As a result, it will be up to the package to do its job entirely without help from the brand's primary sales environment. Starbucks stores aren't licensed to sell alcoholic beverages, and in-store promotions, as Doss explains, might mislead patrons into assuming that the product is available on the premises when it is not.

This means that the package must capture people's attention in the places where they will be able to purchase or consume Starbuck Coffee Liqueur: distilled spirits shops, bars, and white-tablecloth accounts (restaurants, in consumer parlance). In these settings, says Doss, the package will have to "pop off the shelf, and have visibility on the back bar" so that patrons can recognize and ask for it. Hard-working bartenders — potentially the best friends a new beverage can have — get ergonomic help in the form of a container that's easy to grasp and handle. another benefit of the bottle's shaker-like configuration.

"The package definitely was designed with the purchasing environment in mind," says Ciulla, whose team took just as much care with the factory requirements.

Bottling won't be "tipsy"

Making the package easy to manufacture, label, and fill was the "sweet spot" that the specifications needed to hit in order for the package to go successfully into mass production. The sweet spot is in the details: for example, making sure that bottles don't tip as they move along the filling line. Bottle-to-bottle contact does the trick for conventional bottles with two-point contact at the top and bottom. The Starbucks package has only one point of contact around the rim of the "shaker, " but this surface was made ample enough to keep the bottles straight and stable for their trip down the conveyor.

Dale Devore, design manager for Saint-Gobain Containers, says that maintaining the proper "glass wall distribution" was another key consideration in fabricating the package. To counterweigh the bottle's broad-shouldered profile at the top, the glass below was thickened for a better footing all around. Thickening the glass also makes it appear a little darker than its normal amber shade, enhancing the container's espresso-colored appeal.

Doss gives a good deal of the credit for the bottle's performance to the glass suppliers: Saint-Gobain, which sources the one-liter bottle from its plant in Burlington, WI; and Anchor Glass Co., producing the 750 ml size at its Henryetta, OK, facility.

Design competition judges can honor a package for its aesthetic merits, but only the market can award the prize that ultimately counts — commercial success. Ciulla asserts that the Starbucks Coffee Liqueur package "perfectly captures the eclectic and complex nature of the Starbucks brand, always approachable yet exotic and worldly." To judge for yourself how well this design formula will translate into sales, ask for the dark brown bottle with the cocktail-shaker shape wherever spirits are sold.