La Dolce Venti

So here comes Howard D. Schultz, tiptoeing into Italy to announce “with humility” that Starbucks is entering the Italian market.

His one-store Italian strategy will debut in Milan this fall, no doubt in fashionable central Milan on one of those trendy shopping streets that radiate from Piazza del Duomo.

His “aw shucks” announcement was because, he said, of the incredible respect he has for Italy’s coffee culture. Something about not wanting to tamper with the “perfect espresso” or the “signature cappuccino.”

He even insisted that the Starbucks concept was inspired by a 1983 visit he made to Milan for a trade show when Starbucks had four stores in Seattle selling packages of coffee. He said it was Milan’s coffee bars that showed him how to create a place coffee drinkers would flock to.

It’s a tradition he reveres to this day. “There are very few markets and stores that I’m as intimately involved in as this,” he told The New York Times. “We’re going to come here with great humility.”

So he’s not barreling into Italy with the usual hundreds-of-stores-a-year strategy that has worked in 70 other countries around the world. And he’s not bringing the standard Starbucks format to Italy, either. Italians like to drink espresso at a stand-up bar, he explains, so his new Starbucks will have a stand-up bar. He says Italians like to sip espresso from tiny cups, not swallow coffee down from large mugs, so don’t look for venti cups.

Italians pay just one euro, or even less, for a shot of espresso, so don’t expect to see many $4.50 skinny vanilla lattes. And he doesn’t expect to overwhelm the Italian market with the acquired taste of his Starbucks roasts and blends: “We plan to tailor our offerings to the Italian customer in a way that will demonstrate the respect and learning we've acquired,” Starbucks released in a statement, according to International Business Times. Schultz says he’s aware of Italy’s abundance of good coffee shops and refined tastes. Does it really need an American company telling it how to brew espresso?

Humble.

And yet, Starbucks’ normal walk is a swagger, not a tiptoe. It pushed into Paris, home of café au lait. It pushed into Vienna, original home of the kaffeehäus. It pushed into Peru and Colombia, Guatemala and Venezuela, where many of those coffee beans are grown.

Starbucks’ marketing plan rarely begins with one experimental location at a time. Its strategy is based on saturation, which likely also makes its distribution channels more efficient.

As he told the gathering in Milan during the city’s Fashion Week, about 90 million people a week pass through one of the 23,450 Starbucks locations somewhere on earth. Milan is a city of 1.25 million. Can you imagine the line?

If Starbucks feels it can’t make better coffee than, say, Milan’s own Bar Camparino, why is it bothering at all? My guess: Hold onto your hats, Italy, Starbucks is coming – and in a grande (though humble) way!