High Altitude Marketeering

As any soon-to-be parent knows, naming is hard work. What some brand managers don’t know is that it’s often plain unnecessary. Take Tully’s coffee, a Seattle chain of Starbucks-like coffee shops. Like Starbucks, they have decided to make up names for things we already have names for. In Tully’s case, the new terms apply to coffee taste rather than cup sizes.

On the back of the package above, you can see how Tully’s has classified its coffee tastes into three categories: Spirited, Balanced and Bold. But, out of a recognition that their terminology is meaningless to their customers, they’ve hedged their bet by following each of their terms (in the green bars above) with the corresponding term it’s meant to replace (in bold beneath the green bars).

So, rather than romancing their brand with evocative product descriptors, they’ve just provided extra visual and mental clutter. While I’m skeptical that creating a naming system adds much to their messaging, if they’re going to go for it, they should go for it. In the case of this packaging, each heading is followed by a one-sentence descriptor, so the bold translation line is hardly necessary. This sort of second guessing is akin to stopping halfway when crossing a busy street.