I like coffee, and I’m not a snob.

I enjoy Starbucks, but I’ll drink almost any other brand, including drip from a greasy spoon.

In recent years, I’ve stopped dreading our stops at McDonald’s for our kids while traveling to and from our vacations. When McDonald’s got serious about coffee a few years ago, it put Starbucks on notice. I read the recent Harvard Business Review interview with Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, and he had sharp words for his lower-cost competitors:

“… McDonald’s and Dunkin’ Donuts were on the very low end. Let’s characterize them as willing to do anything to capture or intercept customers – free coffee, coupons, say anything, do anything. We respect them as companies, but we didn’t respect their practices.”

I thought that part of the interview sounded a bit whiny. It is business, after all.

Recently, I witnessed McDonald’s “interception policy” firsthand while on a weekend getaway with my wife.

We stopped at an interstate oasis about a hour from our home. In addition to the gas station, the rest area had several shops, including Starbucks and McDonald’s. The two were less than a dozen steps from each other.

If you were standing in line at the Starbucks, however, you couldn’t see the McDonald’s counter, because it was around a corner.

But McDonald’s had put up a visually engaging menu on an empty wall that Starbucks customers saw while standing in line to order – its interception policy.

The first thing I observed: the latte that I planned to order from Starbucks was almost $1 less at McDonald’s!

See the two photos.

I would argue that McDonald’s creative for their menu is more enticing than is Starbucks’.

I toyed with the idea of stepping out of line at Starbucks to walk around a corner to McDonald’s but didn’t. I bought at the premium price. But as soon as I began drinking the latte, I thought, “What am I thinking? Why am I paying more for the same thing?”

I’m not sure that’s the power of a brand. It may simply be a testament to my laziness. Either way, Starbucks won that afternoon.

So can the premium (high cost, high perceived value) survive in a down economy?

Melissa Parks, CZ’s editorial director, thinks so: “The reason I would NEVER buy a latte from McDonald’s is because I associate everything that McDonald’s produces as artificial. Case in point: their Chicken McNuggets. That’s not real chicken. So, when I contemplate drinking a latte, I question if it’s going to be a real latte, or if it’s riddled with all that artificial stuff that keeps their costs down.

“Another reason I would never buy a McDonald’s coffee is because I look at the moms on the playground who drink it, and (I’m being completely honest here) I don’t associate with them. Their experience, based on my prejudice, is not my experience. If I began drinking McDonald’s coffee, I would belong to a different tribe – a discount tribe, and one I really don’t want to be part of. I like being part of the Starbucks tribe – even if it means not drinking a cup every day. I’d rather have a Starbucks latte a couple times a week than a McDonald’s latte every day.”

Customers in North America are finnicky, aren’t they?

Over the past decade, I’ve digested pretty much every book and article and blog that you can imagine on the subject of branding and marketing.

I’ve also interviewed by phone or via email many best-selling authors on aforementioned topics.

I learn something new from each one.

I tend to take away more from the conversation with the author than I do reading his or her book. When you ask the author to clarify a point in the book or give a specific example, often you strip away the flabby writing from the nugget of insight. Most books should be only an article in length. But the publisher wants at least 250 pages, so authors write to fit the book-length medium.

In some marketing writing, though, there’s a common thread that annoys me:

It’s as if the authors all went to the same convention, identified all the “successful stories” and then starting writing. Here are a few of the wake-me-when-they-are-outdated marketing stories:

• Facebook (still looking to make some real money in social media);
• Google (the big dog on the block; who can argue with its success?);
• Starbucks (closing 600 stores soon; see our interview with John Moore: http://www.czmarketing.com/brand/);
• Apple (the brand with design panache);
• SalesForce.com (the clunky convenience of online CRM); and
• Kiva (the creative online micro finance nonprofit).

Before the above, there was:

• Krispy Kreme (now a not-so-hot stock);
• Dell (trying now to reinvent itself);
• Amazon (now just another boring stock); and
•Too many others to mention.

What’s hot is touted as the pinnacle of truth for marketing your organization: “Just follow the marketing principles of this hot company or you will become irrelevant and die a thousand deaths.”

No one writes those words, but that underlying schtick is occasionally assumed in the writing.

Here’s my grumpy point: Growing an organization is hard work. It’s tedious, sometimes monotonous. Not very sexy. And it takes much longer than you think. And just when you think you’ve got it figured out, the demographics or economics of your prospects change. Then you’re forced to regroup and make adjustments in real time.

No doubt Starbucks and Google and Apple have lots to teach the rest of the world. But it’s important to strip out the bravado from the principles and ask the real question: What, if anything, is really relevant to our situation?

Maybe the most important purpose of reading about today’s hot companies is to inspire hope. Growth is possible. Our future can be brighter than our past.

Most people don’t escape junior high without reading Robert Frost’s “Road Less Traveled” in which the speaker contends that when “two roads diverged … taking the road less traveled by … made all the difference.”

In marketing, taking the road less traveled means launching a new brand, rather than extending a brand name; it’s called diverging. To diverge is to notice a hole in the marketplace and then build a completely new brand. Al Ries, co-author of Positioning, and author of the new book The Origin of Brands, trumpets the power of diverging—for both small and large organizations:

B&S: How do you define divergence?

Al Ries: A brand category tends to split up over time and become two or more separate categories. The best example of this is computers. Initially, a computer was a mainframe computer. Nobody called it a mainframe, though, because it was the only kind of computer there was. Now, we have mid-range computers, personal computers, laptops, notebooks, servers, and many other distinct categories of computers.

How do you not lose out?

Al Ries: You create completely new brands. Back in 1921 when Alfred P. Sloan took over General Motors, they had 12 percent of the market. Sloan laid out brands to match what he figured were five emergent categories: Chevrolet, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, and Cadillac. At one point in time, GM had 52 percent of the market.

Look at the success of Lexus. What if Toyota had called the Lexus a Toyota Supreme or Toyota Ultra? Would the premium Toyota be the leading luxury car brand in America today? Would the Mercedes owner trade in a Mercedes for a Toyota? I don’t think so.

So the key is to think more narrowly.

Al Ries: Right. Most people want to broaden it instead of narrow it.

A good example of divergence in action goes back to right after World War 2. Every town in America had a coffee shop, in which you could walk in blindfolded, spin around and point to something. You take the blindfold off and whatever you pointed to you could build a brand around.

If it hit hamburgers, you start McDonald’s. If it hit coffee, you start Starbucks. If it hit chicken, you start Kentucky Fried Chicken. If you hit ice cream, you start Baskin Robbins.

As time went on, the coffee shop disappeared, although almost every item on a coffee shop menu has become a powerful brand, making multi-millionaires out of many people. And they didn’t get to be multi-millionaires by combining something. They got to be millionaires by dividing something—looking at a segment of a market and building a brand around that segment.