Kirk - great feedback. It sounds like you’ve got a good grip on the concept. Based upon your experience writing the resume cover letter, you’ll probably appreciate today’s entry as well. This is one of the fundamental difficulties in marketing — you have to be able to get outside yourself (your business) and get the perspective from a vantage point that you yourself can never reach. It absolutely requires input from the outside. Your point about survival makes the case quite accurately that the identity question impacts a whole lot more than just marketing. In truth, every aspect of a business flows out from that starting point. This week, however, we’re focused on reaching out to customers both present and future. Hope you enjoy the rest of it.

Al - you raise a great question. Sometimes people are able to intuitively create the right combination of factors to produce something. That’s very rare, however. It happens by accident more often than not. I can’t speak to the Starbucks situation with any personal knowledge, so I don’t know how they in particular arrived at such a winning combination. It can be done intentionally, however, by beginning with the end in mind. As with anything, testing is key. Mistakes will be made. Retooling will be required. Even Starbucks is having to adapt to a changing marketplace to due to unrelated factors right now.

As believers, however, we have a tremendous advantage in that we can tap the source of all wisdom. Answers like the ones we need don’t always fall out of the sky easily, but we can certainly receive them from the Holy Spirit with some focused prayer and quiet listening.

JoAnn, you hit on a great point with the “good that we do.” They’ve tapped into a fundamental principle that if you can tie someone’s purchases to a cause or a mission they can believe in, then you fulfill a need for purpose and significance in your customers. In the long run, there must be integrity and a substantive good cause, or else it falls apart or even backfires. Those of us who are principled can find (or probably already have more than we can support) any number of valid causes to tie in to what we do. One caveat: since this has been exploited by unsavory types (and there are those who question the validity and effectiveness of even Starbucks’ fair trade dealings), we have to pay attention to how it gets presented and be willing to allow inspection of our results.

Looking forward to more discussion this week!

Entertainment is why they have more ambience than McDonald’s. Legal addictive stimulants is why they can charge more than McDonald’s. Coffee is the answer they might fall back on if the economy softens more.

This thing about knowing who you are is very fundamental. It might be key to why Howard Schultz is back as the CEO at Starbucks.

Its also basic in other ways. I find it an ordeal to write a cover letter for a resume. Should that be an exercise in a high school English class where the English teacher partners with the guidance counselor or youth pastor? If a student can’t write a persuasive cover letter when he or she can write effectively for other purposes, maybe that would be a good time in life to dig in for some answers.

Studies of all kinds of business from small to large show that profit and survival derive from knowing who you are well enough to be unique. The me-too company trails in profitability and is in danger of not surviving when massive change comes along.

Feedback for Michael, this could be an interesting addition to your blog. A guest post on a regular basis to help us become more effective in what we do could be interesting. All to often we end up turning to the world for advice on many of these matters. It would be helpful to get the expert advice of godly men and women for many of the challenges we face as small businessmen and women.