Coffee and makeup don't generally mix, but when it comes to selling either globally, similar skills are apparently needed. Coffee giant Starbucks has plucked its new Global CMO from Sephora in Sharon Rothstein, who was SVP of marketing for the  will join the company in mid-April and won’t just be overseeing the marketing efforts of Starbucks, but also the company’s other brands, such as Seattle's Best Coffee, Evolution Fresh, La Boulange, Tazo and Teavana, Motley Fool reports.

Rothstein, who will be replaced at Sephora by former report Julie Bornstein (promoted from SVP of digital to chief marketing and digital officer), has worked with a plethora of big brands including Godiva, Starwood Hotels and Resorts and P&G, so she knows a thing or two about customer experience and brings those Sephora-honed digital chops.

“I have been a loyal Starbucks customer and fan for most of my adult life and I am humbled to become a partner (employee) at one of the few companies in the world that embraces the value and responsibility of balancing business performance and social impact,” she said in a press release. Rothstein will also oversee the company's Seattle's Best Coffee, Evolution Fresh, La Boulange, Tazo and Teavana brands.

The social conscience side of Starbucks also gets a boost from another big announcement this week: that it's buying its first coffee farm, a 600-acre spread in Costa Rica that will serve as the company's first global agronomy center and the center of its $70 million ethical sourcing program.Continue reading...

Starbucks is steering its brand to new heights and growing sales despite a number of global challenges, making its defensive pullback of a few years ago ever more of a distant memory.

Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz described for investors on Thursday advances ranging from an increased U.S. store count to solid customer response in Mumbai, and from a better-than-expected test of La Boulange bakery goods to rapid growth of its digital initiative.

He was bullish on about every count, even though slowing growth in China has hurt many other QSR chains and there were "unusual headwinds" in other markets such as the United States, he said, which was hurt by Super Storm Sandy.

Overall, Starbucks' fourth-quarter sales at same stores improved by 11 percent in China and the Asia-Pacific region, by 7 percent in the Americas and by 6 percent globally as a result of the company's aggressive international expansion and equally determined domestic growth initiatives, Shultz said.Continue reading...

Lipton is going back to basics, in a way, to add new aroma to its U.S. tea business with the first marketing campaign behind its staple black-tea products in America in nearly a quarter-century.

Lipton—the biggest name in tea globally, at over 100 countries and 100 years old—also has held on to its lead in the US CPG dry-tea market for decades, despite essentially having ignored its basic black teas in a marketing sense.

Now, the Unilever-owned brand has launched a campaign aimed at getting US tea consumers to "Drink Positive" (a play on "Think Positive") and to appreciate the uplift that tea can give them. It's also a move to increase the number of tea-drinkers by skewing younger.

The integrated campaign by DDB New York includes TV, digital (liptontea.com, its US Facebook page, Instagram and Twitter) and a visual refresh by making the iconic Lipton packaging a more vibrant shade of yellow.Continue reading...

Whatever you're sipping these days, Starbucks wants to be the brand you're sipping.

As richly as Starbucks brand has made its name on coffee, selling and evoking the world of coffee-growing, -processing and -drinking, it's the tea universe — with a wide variety of ingredients and flavors and functional purposes — that strikes many as much more intriguing these days. So in announcing its purchase of the Teavana tea chain, the company's biggest-ever acquisition, Starbucks is betting as much on being able to exploit the lore and learning about tea as it is in selling the beverage itself. "We will do for tea what we did for coffee," Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz told the Wall Street Journal about the $620-million deal.Continue reading...

Green Mountain Coffee is in a pot of trouble. And that's even before Starbucks introduces Verismo, its own single-serve brewing system for consumers that's rolling out in October (and already available on Verismo.com), to challenge the iconic K-Cup system by Green Mountain that features its Keurig pods. 

The brand has been a darling of consumers for several years, on a continued growth tear as K-Cups led a revolution in how Americans consume much of their coffee by making the single-serve system de rigeur in homes and offices. The company fed strong double-digit sales growth by continuing to proliferate the types of pods, to include "iced" drinks and juices as well as coffees and teas.

Green Mountain also had been a darling of investors seeking to cash in on a boom that, for the six years after the Vermont-based company acquired Keurig, managed to thrive without attracting the competitive interest of Starbucks.Continue reading...

Starbucks has been spreading its wings in recent months. First the news came that some of its outlets would start serving beer and wine. Then Starbucks opened its first Evolution Fresh juice bar in suburban Seattle. Earlier this month, the ubiquitous coffee chain purchased the Bay Area's La Boulange bakery for $100 million in a bid to upgrade its food offerings. (That deal was done in cash, by the way. No word if the money was in a briefcase handcuffed to anybody’s wrist.)

That’s a lot of wing-spreading, but Starbucks execs over there must be cranking down extra double espressos these days because now comes word that Starbucks is giving more love to another sub-brand by opening its first Tazo tea store this fall in the hopes of doing for tea what the company has done for coffee drinking.

The plan is for the Tazo store, located in its corporate hometown of Seattle, to “sell more than 80 varieties of loose-leaf tea and other tea products,” Reuters reports, and “also offer hot and cold tea drinks, brewing equipment, pastries, packaged chocolates, infused sugars and honey.” As it is now, Tazo is a $1.4 billion brand for Starbucks, but the company would like to grow it since it estimates that the global market for tea is $95 billion.

And today Starbucks announced its first Seattle's Best Coffee "commuter concept" store in Brooklyn, near the NYC borough's new Barclays Center sports arena that will be home to the Brooklyn Nets this fall.

According to a press release, SBC's "concept menu, which debuted as a test in Chicago in March, boasts delicious coffee beverages, and commuter-friendly sandwiches and snacks that will appear for the first time on the East Coast." We assume that Brooklyn Nets co-owner Jay-Z will approve.

McDonald's UK will introduce Mad Men-inspired uniforms at London 2012 Olympics venue.

Kia Soul scores in J.D. Power auto quality study while Lexus repeats as #1 overall and Ford and Chrysler slip in key automotive rankings.

Starbucks to open first tea-only store under Tazo brand.

Facebook Credits system is being phased out for new payment platform, while IPO attracts Capitol Hill inquiry, "like" button migrates to third-party mobile apps, and unique visitors drop.

Apple fined in Australia for misleading iPad advertising.

BlackBerry-maker RIM downsizes workforce.

Cabot to buy Norit for $1.1 billion.

Cannes Lions announces winners for creative effectiveness, media, mobile and outdoor.Continue reading...

Talk about vertical integration! Starbucks is taking the concept to new heights — er, depths — with its announcement of the imminent introduction of its own machine to make single cups of coffee.

The product, named Verismo, will be launched soon and sold at some Starbucks stores as well as specialty retail locations right away and then more heavily marketed and sold in the fall. The machine was developed with Krueger, a German-based company, and it "combines Starbucks signature Espresso Roast and drink recipes with precise Swiss engineering and a patent-pending high pressure extraction capability," Starbucks said in a press release.

The move is yet another bid by Starbucks to broaden and deepen its franchise over the last couple of years. The company also today, in Amsterdam, was scheduled to open its first "concept shop" laboratory meant to imbue its retail outlets with more "local flavor." Inspired by concept stores in its hometown of Seattle, the new Amsterdam store features in-house-baked cookies, for instance, and will test other ideas. It's housed in an old bank vault in the city's historic Rembrandt square.Continue reading...