Until recently, Starbucks didn’t need to advertise; all those people carrying around their mermaid-logo paper cups were marketing enough. Terry Davenport, the company’s senior vice president of marketing, conceded on the website that the new campaign was partly a response to “others [that] are looking to compete for our coffee customers.” He also, more obliquely, pointed to the economy as a reason, saying that consumers have switched from “conspicuous consumption” (i.e., $4.05 Starbucks lattes) to “conscientious consumption…with less money to spend.” Starbucks, he says, must reach out to coffee drinkers who are forced to make “trade-offs.” Adds Honack, “You advertise in down periods.”

Starbucks is taking the threat from small coffeehouses just as seriously. Starbucks last year purchased Coffee Equipment Company, the four-year-old legend founded by three young engineers in an abandoned Seattle-area trolley shed, whose single-cup Clover coffeemaker has developed a cult following. The $11,000 Clover machine allows baristas to quickly fine-tune individual cups of coffee. The deal also will help Starbucks push aside the small cafés, which will no longer be able to buy—or even get spare parts for—the Clover.

Stacy Mitchell, a community development adviser with the Washington-based Institute for Local Self-Reliance and author of the book Big-Box Swindle, has another theory: She calls the new cafés “one of the more brazen attempts by a corporation to disguise itself as a locally owned business.” Being seen as one of those big, bad McChains that’s taking over and homogenizing the world isn’t such a good strategy anymore.

But the off-brand stores may be the real key to Starbuck's future success. it is crucial for the company to reconnect with the passionate coffee drinkers of the world, the very people who embraced the company during its early years and moved on.

And there is a precedent for success.

Winer compares the dual strategy to Colgate-Palmolive Company’s acquisition of Tom’s of Maine toothpaste in 2006: On the supermarket shelves, he points out, “Colgate keeps its [traditional, chemical-laden] toothpaste far away from [all-natural] Tom’s.” Robert Passikoff, founder and president of the New York City consulting firm Brand Keys, likens the effort to “a new line extension.”

Passikoff says the ad campaign is unlikely to work because it’s aimed at the wrong problem—Starbucks’ loss of its premium image. He has more hopes for the unbranded cafés. “I think it’s the best idea they’ve had in a long time.”