I stumbled upon a news article on Facebook that was trending last week. It was a store in LA that opened up as “Dumb Starbucks” It had everything the same as the internationally recognized successful brand Starbucks, except it had the word dumb in front of everything.
The thing is – people were raging at how creative this was. Attention was plentiful and success was evident by the number of people talking about it. It was an obvious “parody” that is protected under the intellectual property law. It was open for about three days before it was under fire from the LA Health Inspection and shut down.
The person who came up with this said the following in a Jimmy Kimmel Interview:
“Technically, legally speaking, we’re an art gallery, and the coffee we’re selling is considered the art and art galleries don’t need health permits,”
This whole ordeal had me thinking about ethics. I will admit that this was a creative stunt that fell within the boundaries, but something about it is off. It does not seem right that the law would support something like this. I understand that mockery is parodies are for entertainment and should be preserved, but this is pushing it for me.
I think that what bothers me is the fact that people feel the need to be “more creative” and to “Push the boundaries” in order to be noticed. People were entertained by the idea of “Dumb Starbucks” and in some ways it has shock value to capture the attention of people like myself. (The shock was that it was legally allowed to operate under that name.) Ethically it is in the grey area for me. Piggybacking on another companies success/hard word to market yourself is something I’m not a huge fan of. (E.g. when Nike used ambush marketing at FIFA and got more hits than Adidas even though it was sponsored by Adidas.) It’s creative, but it’s not ethical and it’s undermining.
This was a positive publicity stunt for Starbucks despite it being mocked for the sake of a parody. It gets their brand noticed more, but it wasn’t (to my knowledge) instigated by them. In almost any other case I would’ve thought of this as a marketing ploy to catch my attention.
Sources:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/feb/12/dumb-starbucks-trademark-lawyer
http://www.brandchannel.com/home/post/World-Cup-Daily-061710.aspx