Why we speak Starbucks

By Michael Waters

You used to be able to walk into a café and get a coffee with minimal fuss. These days ordering a drink requires knowledge of a sophisticated lexicon. Seasoned customers of Starbucks, the world’s biggest chain of coffee shops, utter a rapid-fire trail of adjectives when asking for a drink, rehearsing a menu system that blends generic descriptions of hot drinks – half caf, black, no-whip – with branded jargon. Instead of small, medium and large, the company touts its own set of sizes: tall, grande, venti and trenta (the last two are trademarked by Starbucks). The coffee chain also has a particular language to describe how the milk should be added, referring to macchiatos as “marble” and mochas as “zebra”. Starbucks even uses its own grammar: you say your size before your syrup, your preferred milk before your primary drink.

The company enshrined these linguistic rules in a booklet in 2003, “Make It Your Drink”. Starbucks claims it came up with the system to enable baristas to make drinks more quickly and efficiently. Branding experts say it is also an ingenious way of forging customer loyalty. Companies that persuade people to use their own terminology create “a sense of belonging and enhanced loyalty to the brand” according to Dawn Lerman, a professor of marketing at Fordham University in New York, in her book “The Language of Branding”.

Sociologists have long argued that people become part of a “speech community” when they use specialised vocabulary, which creates a feeling of shared values. Every time a company gets a consumer to refer to its product using branded terminology rather than a generic description – Whoppers, say, rather than burgers – it is drawing them in to its own community. In so doing, it makes them more likely to buy its products in future.

Many companies use this technique. When hungry Californians order a meal at In-N-Out, a burger chain, they need to specify the ratio of cheese slices to patties: a “triple double” means two burgers sandwiched between three slices of cheese, whereas ordering a “4x3” will get you four patties and three cheese slices. CrossFit, a fitness firm, boasts a vocabulary so extensive that the internet is riddled with CrossFit glossaries. Firebreather denotes a particularly dedicated CrossFit athlete; wod means the “workout of the day”. As one enthusiastic customer blogged: “All this helps to create a ‘tribe’ that members identify with.”

Starbucks not only has a branded vocabulary but a system for teaching it. As well as publishing the “Make It Your Drink” language guide, the company has trained its baristas to reply to customers in Starbucks lingo, turning a “small cappuccino with an extra shot and foam” into a “double-tall cap, extra dry”. Whether they want it or not, these days Starbucks customers get a shot of vocab with their tall skinny latte.■

PHOTOGRAPH Paul Zak