Starbucks is trialling a new coffee shop brand called 15th Ave. Coffee & Tea. At the heart of the concept is a local look and feel including distressed furniture, tea samplings, poetry readings and the like.

Andrew Hetzel, a coffee consultant says: “Starbucks may be renaming its stores to provide a testing ground for changes and, possibly, to bring in a new brand of consumer. It looks to me that they are testing a specialty (sic) sub-brand to see if they can capture some other segment of the market that would otherwise be disillusioned by a large corporate chain.”

It will be interesting to see whether Starbucks can develop a successful format that will compete directly with the Starbucks alternatives. Will customers care whether the coffee house is actually local so long as it looks and operates in a semi-local fashion? Are customers dogmatic local business supporters or is there a trade-off point between quality, awareness, design, ambience and community involvement?

Whether successful or not, this move demonstrates once again that global corporations are seriously concerned about promoting the idea of being local and providing forums for community participation. Bigger is no longer necessarily better, if it means taking on the image of homogenising neighbourhoods like Wal-Mart, when it comes to an involved experience like sitting and having a cup of coffee.

Starbucks offered a free cup of coffee to anyone who said they voted on November 4^th. So, it seems they are adding civic action to the long list of other worthy activities they endorse. Starbucks is known for Fairtrade, (red) and a bunch of other worthy efforts, but this was a new one on us. Of course, the Starbucks brand will hope to benefit from a reflected perception of fairness, egalitarianism and civil duty. This year’s American election saw politicians use more savvy new media resources than any previous one. It’s interesting to suppose that big brands can leverage this event in the same way that they leverage the Olympics for example, through direct sponsorship and inference.