• by Kate Newlin , August 1, 2009

It's not that it's "doomed to fail" so much as "what would success look like?" This may be the Starbucks' version of TED and Song.

Remember how crazy, desperate United and Delta got when JetBlue started making cheap flights cool? With those nutty flight attendants' ad libs, TV in the seats and interesting snacks? They thought they couldn't compete with that tonality, so they created two new sub-brands; Song even got Kate Spade to design the uniforms.

But the entrepreneurial "Let's just try it and see what happens" model didn't make sense for big brands like United and Delta, and they quickly began folding all that equipment and the people back into the base brands.

Remember when Gap tried to launch a new store brand called Fourth & Towne? Trying to mask bigness with a kind of archetypal local address? These attempts clearly did not succeed in building new business for these big, clunky brands.

Did they learn anything about trying become hip? Doubtful. Maybe they learned that it's harder to do than it looks. Ask any middle-aged divorced guy with a two-seater convertible.

Will Starbucks learn anything by trying to be locally relevant from an HQ vantage point? Maybe.

Maybe it takes that kind of incubation to gain the kind of learning that can be re-applied within the core. It's clearly a high-profile initiative within their culture.

Whoever has been charged with driving it has a huge incentive to succeed as a business or at least position "success" as being a learning lab for base Starbucks.