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Sitting in a Starbucks in New York as I write this, it occurs to me that some of the biggest commercial successes of our times like the two products associated with the aforementioned activity - a cup of coffee and an Internet device - have been lifestyle ones.
Coffee drinking has been a legitimate activity ever since its caffeine fix was discovered in the northeast region of Ethiopia centuries ago. But it took three aficionados of the bean - English teacher Jerry Baldwin, history teacher Zev Siegl, and writer Gordon Bowker - to make it a worldwide phenomenon. Today the company they created, Starbucks, is a $13.29-billion company with 20,891 stores in 62 countries.
How was this achieved? My surmise is that the success of Starbucks lies in the fact that it sold much more than a hot cup of beverage: it sold a lifestyle.
At first it was the inviting armchairs and the easy drawing-room appearance of its stores. The music, clean loos and free wifi helped. Today, at the Starbucks I'm in, a raft of laptop and phone chargers are tucked under each seat and there has been every attempt possible to engage the customer in myriad ways so that he or she keeps coming back for not only that one cup but the lifestyle it delivers. Where on earth did people go to read, surf, write, cogitate, make and receive calls, visit the restroom, hang out between meetings and a host of other activities before Starbucks?
Like Starbucks, the success of Apple is based on a similar principle: lifestyle. Laptops and phones and the Internet existed long before Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne appeared on the scene, but it was their products - the Mac line of computers, iPod music player, iPhone and iPad tablet - that defined the netizens of their age. With Jobs' genius for design and intuitive understanding of the human psyche, his creations did more than their rivals: they afforded a lifestyle to their owners. Jobs did not make what his customer wanted; he created things that his customer did not even imagine he'd need!
Other successes in today's world are built on the same principle. From an information aggregator, Google has evolved into a multi-armed conglomerate that interfaces with its clients at all points in their daily lives: through its maps, its access to yellow pages like Yelp and encyclopedias like Wikipedia, its GPS service and Gmail, cloud computing, software and online advertising technologies and, of course, its universally popular search service.
But if Starbucks and Apple, the two lifestyle enhancers in our modern world, are such runaway successes, what can one say about that other product that has colonised most of the modern world with its ubiquity, Facebook? Again Mark Zuckerberg stumbled upon an idea that touched users' lives in different ways, making it one of the most significant lifestyle components of their lives.
Where will the next big idea for lifestyle come from? Hotel chains like Intercontinental, Hilton and Starwoods, furniture stores like IKEA, automobile manufacturers like Suzuki and General Motors and even entertainment companies and clothing manufacturers have every opportunity to expand their outreach (and strengthen their bottom line) by engaging with their customers with far more depth and profundity.
How do they sell lifestyle rather than just a hotel room, a car, a film, a tee or a chair? Their success and survival will depend on how they resolve this.
Malavika Sangghvi is a Mumbai-based writer malavikasangghvi@hotmail.com
Disclaimer: These are personal views of the writer. They do not necessarily reflect the opinion of www.business-standard.com or the Business Standard newspaper
