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”.