The case describes the hospitality brand Azulik which offers a unique luxury experience based on a set of contemporary values that resonate with the most demanding international consumers: connecting to art, nature and local communities. In the process of building the resort, a series of brands were created to fill the various needs of the guests staying at Azulik—restaurants, bar, spa, shops, museum… Vadim Grigoryan, the marketing consultant to Azulik, has been tasked to bring order to the portfolio of independent brands created, as managing the portfolio is expensive and inefficient, while at the same time failing to exploit the potential synergies that can be realized through a thoughtful brand architecture to create a clear, differentiated, and powerful offering to customers. The case puts students/participants in Vadim’s shoes and requires them to decode the Azulik brand and articulate the key values underpinning the brand’s identity, decide what role each of the independent brands should play, and whether and how these independent brands need to be connected to the Azulik master brand. The case thus offers the opportunity to understand all the decisions necessary in creating a powerful brand architecture as well as the frameworks to do so.

Starbucks has been trying to grow beyond coffee for a while now and turn itself in to a food and beverages giant. What does this mean when one thinks of the challenge from a consumer perspective? It means that while currently consumers think of Starbucks as an option when they think of “having a coffee,” Starbucks now wants consumers to think about it whenever they think about food and beverages. With this goal in mind, Starbucks has acquired Evolution Fresh juices, La Boulange Café and Bakery, and Teavana.

Having a broader range of food and beverages to sell is clearly a prerequisite for moving from being perceived as a purveyor of coffee to a food and beverage player. However, having the consumer make the mental shift is going to be challenging, time consuming, and expensive.

Currently, consumers believe Starbucks to be a specialist in coffee. This has been reinforced since its inception through every element of its business activities. The result has been that in many consumers’ minds a cup of good coffee is synonymous with Starbucks. What is important to understand is that strength in one category can signal weakness in another.

Consider for a moment tea. It seems that the world is pretty clearly divided in terms of tea and coffee. If one thinks of China, one thinks of tea while countries like the US, France, Italy, and Spain are clearly associated with coffee. Now, anyone with any experience in China would be familiar with the ghastly everyday version of coffee ubiquitous in China—a packet containing a mix of instant coffee, whitener, and sugar! Clearly, a Chinese company trying to make a case for being an expert in coffee would fail miserably as the associations in our minds would simply not find the claims credible. The same problem would handicap Starbucks from succeeding with tea under the Starbucks brand. We could extend the argument to other beverages where expertise in coffee, if anything, detracts from being experts in that category of beverages.

What can Starbucks Inc. do when it comes to these other beverages? It can distance the Starbucks name from its ventures in tea and other beverages and build those businesses as standalone brands or perhaps brands weakly endorsed by Starbucks. To the degree the new brands succeed, there would be a rub off on the Starbucks brand, helping it to broaden its associations in the consumers’ minds to a player in beverages.

The food businesses are a different kettle of fish. At this time, to the degree they are foods that fit in a coffeehouse, like baked goods, it is not a problem. Such foods can be sold as an independently branded line within the existing Starbucks outlets or simply as products under the Starbucks banner, helping expand Starbucks’ footprint in consumers’ minds. Perhaps, down the line, as the food business grows and consumers associate Starbucks with food and not just coffee, it can act as a stepping stone to a broader footprint in the food business, helping to broaden the Starbucks brand in to a café with a broad offering of food. Such a two pronged approach may help move Starbucks from primarily a morning business focused on coffee to one that extends through a larger part of the day, catering to the lunchtime crowd, and perhaps even later with a broad array of foods and beverages.

The key point here is that Starbucks needs to move thoughtfully and carefully and exhibit patience if it is to successfully morph from its current positioning as a coffeehouse to a food and beverages giant.