The WSJ has an interesting expose on the new Starbucks logo:
If you want the corporate take on why Starbucks recently deleted the green ring from its logo—and, in fact, the word Starbucks—you can listen to Howard Schultz, the company’s CEO, soberly explain, in a promotional video, why the “essence of the Starbucks experience” in the 21st century is better reflected by … an unadorned mermaid-siren.
But not long ago, before the branding rethink, the author of the blog Got Medieval, a graduate student in medieval studies at Yale, detected “something fishy” about the mermaid, specifically about the stories Starbucks was spinning about her. He lays out the problem crisply:
Here is the official history of the Starbucks logo, as found on Starbucks.com’s FAQ page.
When we were originally looking for a logo for Starbucks in 1971, we wanted to capture the seafaring tradition of early coffee traders. [...] We pored over old marine books until we came up with a logo based on an old sixteenth-century Norse woodcut: a two-tailed mermaid encircled by the store’s original name, Starbucks Coffee, Tea, and Spice.
And here is the same story embellished a bit in company co-founder Howard Schultz’s 1997 book Pour Your Heart into It: How Starbucks Build a Company One Cup at a Time where it goes something like this:
[Fellow Starbucks founder] Terry [Heckler] also poured over old marine books until he came up with a logo based on an old sixteenth-century Norse woodcut: a two-tailed mermaid, or siren, encircled by the store’s original name, Starbucks Coffee, Tea, and Spice. That early siren, bare-breasted and Rubenesque, was supposed to be as seductive as coffee itself.
Writes Got Medieval, going in for the kill: “Now, here’s the problem with this tidy little origin story: there’s no such thing as a 16th-century Norse woodcut.”
He lays out the evidence for this conclusion, in considerable detail, before summing up:
If medieval studies teach us anything, it’s to be extra cautious with origin stories. Just as there was almost certainly no conveniently named Trojan refugee Brutus who founded Britain (nor Turkus Turkey, nor Francus France), no sword in the stone that elected a Welshman the king of all England, no Donation given by Emperor Constantine of all his earthly power to the Catholic Pope, and no shape-changing serpent lady Melusine to sleep with the Count of Anjou, there was almost certainly no “sixteenth-century Norse woodcut” floating around Seattle in 1971. It’s far more likely that three businessmen and coffee afficianados searching for a symbol for their new coffee shop in Pike Place Market turned to the American edition of The Dictionary of Symbols—which, incidentally, was first published in that same year, 1971. But the urge to clean things up and make them more inspiring than they were is simply irresistible where one’s origins are concerned.
http://blogs.wsj.com/ideas-market/2011/ ... -cover-up/
Regards, Bob