Dunkin’ Donuts: ReBranding Case Study in the Making
Those of you with a subscription to the Wall Street Journal will have likely read of Dunkin’ Donuts plans to expand their munu to include sandwiches and other lunch/dinner offerings, remodel all 5000 stores within the next three years and expand threefold over the next fifteen. I, unfortunately, don’t have a subscription and so have to learn vicariously of their plans through the blogosphere and other press releases.
The plans seem to stem from research into the habits, opinions and views of core Dunkin’ Donuts customers and customers of their coffee competitor, Starbucks. They found that there are two basic coffee ‘tribes’ amongst their potential customer base. The Starbucks tribe, will not enter a Dunkin’ Donuts. The stores are too bare, the coffee too plain and they want to add their own milk and sugar thank you. Any chance of getting soy milk in a Dunkin’? Conversely the Dunkin’ Donuts tribe found Starbucks an equally uncomfortable experience, finding the comfort of a Starbucks bewildering (as one Dunkin’ Tribeswoman said ‘If I want to sit on a couch, I stay at home‘) and the $4 price tag for a coffee unfathomable.
Dunkin’ Donuts, in their bid to expand has chosen to walk a tightrope. How much can you change to woo the members of the opposing tribe before you begin to turn off the members of your own tribe? Slashfood is dubious of both the strategy and of the rumoured rebranding to just plain ‘Dunkin’.
John Moore, offers his observations and suggests they should have avoided the tightrope all together, “given [the research findings mentioned in the WSJ article], why isn’t Dunkin’ accentuating the differences rather than blurring the differences between the two?“. Given John’s a former Retail Marketing Manager for Starbucks, I think it’s safe to say he speaks with authority on the subject.
Meanwhile, we have a chance to learn more of the Dunkin’ Donuts strategy through the blog of Hill|Holiday, the company launching the new campaign. As Baba Shetty blogs, “the brief that our team received last fall was pretty clear. Equip the brand to grow dramatically, and make sure we appeal to both the loyalists (primarily in the Northeast) who already know and love Dunkin’, and introduce the company to everybody else.”
The campaign itself, ‘America Runs on Dunkin’‘ is a good play towards the core Dunkin’ tribe. These are the people for whom coffee is not a fashion accessory, status symbol nor statement of personal expression. These are the folks for whom coffee is the delivery mechanism of their morning caffeine and they’ll just have coffee flavoured coffee, thanks. Likewise, the idea of giving the staff a sense of a higher purpose, a good motivator. However, I’m not sure how many of the minimum wage earners will take it that way and how many will rebel. That will come down to execution of the strategy and how it plays out with the various managers.
Overall, I tend to lean towards John Moore’s line of thought. Focus on making Dunkin’ Donuts the quintessential Dunkin’ and the tribe will follow and prosper. I’ve long felt that brand is something that derives from the customers, not the marketers. The money and effort thrown into a rebranding is often best invested in improving the customer experience and focusing on the aspects that originally made you successful.
Time will tell, however, and in the meanwhile I shall be reading the Hill|Holiday blog with interest.
