Out of the Bodega and Onto the Scene

Branding is a art that I love fam!!!

By BEN SISARIO

OUTSIDE a small ranch house in the Southern California desert on April 19, one of the satellite parties of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival was reaching its midafternoon peak. The D.J. blared Lil Jon into the open air, the V.I.P.’s escaped the baking sun for shade, and the girls by the pool giggled as they tossed around a bright yellow beach ball marked with the logo for one of the party’s sponsors.

But unlike most of the 18 other brands on display here (Imeem, Vitaminwater) this one stood out: Café Bustelo, the old Cuban-style espresso. Around the pool, its retro-kitsch symbol was everywhere: on the empty cans of Bustelo Cool littering every table; on the burlap gift bags stamped with “I ♥ Café Bustelo”; and on the artfully ripped T-shirts on the models handing out coffee-and-vodka cocktails they call Dirty Bustelos.

For anyone who hasn’t been keeping an eye on beverage marketing, it was enough to draw a confused double-take. A decadent party at a prestigious rock festival is hardly what comes to mind when you think of Café Bustelo, whose plain yellow and red can has been a bodega standby for eight decades. Potent, cheap and with an aura of both urban exotica and blue-collar utility, it’s long been an item on the bohemian shopping list, even making it into the lyrics to “Rent” (“Bustelo, Marlboro, banana by the bunch”).

In the D.J. booth, Dominique Keegan, 37, alternated between puffs on a cigarette and praise for the coffee’s down-market perfection. “I live on Avenue C, and I go to the Essex market every day,” he said in a half-Irish, half-French accent. “I get my Bustelo coffee for like $2 a half-pound, and I live on that.”

But as if proof that every humble product will eventually get its upscale rebranding, Café Bustelo is in the midst of a makeover. As with Pabst Blue Ribbon and Hush Puppies before it, Bustelo’s appeal to the hipster demographic is being seized upon by a company eager to exploit its every last drop of cool. For the last two years, Bustelo has been a fixture at parties and giveaway suites from the Winter Music Conference to Sundance to the Oscars, and the company behind it has been sending truckloads of it to 50 Cent and Perez Hilton.

Whenever there is coolsploitation, however, there is potential trouble, and marketing experts say that Café Bustelo’s reboot will not be easy. For one, it has a loyal Hispanic customer base that it can’t afford to alienate. It also faces competition for that urbanite coffee dollar from Goliaths like Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts. And then there is the danger that Bustelo might not be as hip as its purveyor thinks it is.

“Every company tries to be a lifestyle brand now,” said Jonah Disend, the founder of Redscout, a brand strategy firm in New York. “Everybody comes in and goes to the cool places and thinks it will just work. But it can come off as very hollow.” READ