A Grande No Whip Akeelah & the Bee

After a tasty dinner at PF Chang's that included [vegetarian] lettace wraps, Wheezy and I saw Akeelah and the Bee, the movie Starbucks has produced and marketing like mad at all of their stores. The movie was awesome and the kids were great...nine thumbs up. To top off a already successful night out, we walked over to Fanueil Hall for some Beard Papa Cream Puffs.

...now the geekier part of this post.

We've been discussing "synergies" in strategy class this week and it has just dawned on me that this whole Starbucks producing a movie and then promoting it in their stores just might be an example of a company expanding into new and seemingly unrelated lines of business. According to my textbook, synergies are achieved when Starbucks somehow makes more money doing both coffee and movies than a movie and coffee company would earn individually. Sort of that mathematically unlogical cliche, "one plus one is more than two." Disney making cartoons, but also featuring those cartoon characters at Disneyland is a brilliant example of how making movies can increase demand and ticket prices for theme parks which in turn increase customer's demand for movies...yada yada yada. Afterall, I know that Mickey lives at Disneyland and by golly I pay big bucks to hang out with him and his gaggle of friends. While I'm very pleased with Starbucks coffee and I'm charmed by Akeelah, I'm not sure if I'm willing to pay more to see a Starbucks made movie or pay more to drink a coffee that's movie related. Maybe they save money by marketing it inhouse...maybe that's the link I'm missing.