[image from abc. For those new to the Ethiopia coffee trademark issue, start here]

The Starbucks vs. Ethiopian coffee trademarking initiative battle rages on — and lucky for us, we now have a new and super-informative paper called from Douglas Holt, L’Oreal Professor of Marketing at the Said Business School at University of Oxford.

Douglas asks in his title, “Is Starbucks ‘Coffee That Cares’?” His conclusion: no. Douglas organizes his paper by the claims Starbucks has been putting out to the public — “a series of obfuscating statements and public relations stunts—from sending their CEO to Ethiopia to putting its Vice-President on YouTube—in an attempt to deflect attention and confuse the public.” — and works to refute them.

Take, for example, Starbucks’ claim that it was not involved in blocking the trademarking effort — that it was instead the National Coffee Association. Well, aside from the fact that “NCA exists to advocate the interests of the big coffee marketers and a key part of the organization’s role is to lobby the government to advance the interests of its members,” guess who’s the chair of the NCA’s Government Relations Committee? That would be one Dub Hay, a VP at Starbucks.

More importantly at this point, since NCA has already filed its 400+ page opposition to Ethiopia’s trademarking efforts, Starbucks has said that it opposes trademarks because they would hurt Ethiopian farmers economically. Aside from being more than a tad patronizing to the Ethiopians, oppositions can only be filed if the party filing it feels they themselves will be financially injured:

According to the USPTO, such opposition proceedings are allowed if a party (Starbucks in this case) believes that it will be “aggrieved” (that is, economically injured) by the registration of a trademark. So the only way that Starbucks, via the NCA, could register its opposition, is to make a self-interested argument: that the Ethiopian trademarks would negatively impact the company. It is nonsensical to argue that the NCA filed its opposition to the USPTO in order to support the interests of the Ethiopian coffee farmers.

Starbucks has also claimed that trademarking coffees is illegal — an absurd claim, considering that Yirgacheffe has already earned a trademark from the USPTO.

As for the whole “certification is better than trademarking” issue that Starbucks has been trying to push: Starbucks’ CEO himself doesn’t understand the diff between the two, but Douglas clearly delineates between them in his paper. Certification’s used primarily “to protect traditional regional foods and beverages against counterfeits and copycats.” But Ethiopian coffee farmers aren’t dealing with counterfeits and copycats, so certification is not something that would benefit them.

Douglas points out that “Certification marks are designed to defend valuable intellectual property, not to develop economic value.” This seems to mark what makes the issue of certification different for Ethiopian coffees than it was for other products that HAVE benefited from certification. Considering the fact that Ethiopia’s not trying to fend off counterfeiters, but rather working to gain more negotiating power in the global market, certification doesn’t seem to be a viable route, says Douglas.

Read the paper — It’s a quick and fascinating read — to find out more about Starbucks’ claim that it pays a significant premium over market price for Ethiopian coffees — an argument that obfuscates the real market price of premium, high-quality coffees.

This paper’s a followup of sorts on his previous paper — “Brand Hypocricy at Starbucks” — which I wrote about here. Starbucks doesn’t look ready to relent anytime soon, so maybe we’ll get more from Douglas as the battle continues –

Update, 1/29/07: Tony Blair to meet to talk about the Ethiopian coffee trademark issue with Tadesse Meskela, the Ethiopian coffee co-op guy featured in Black Gold. The two will also watch Black Gold. “Meskela already has the backing of Ed Balls, economic secretary to the Treasury.” More about the trademark issue here.

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