I always toy with whether to tip at coffee shops, $2 coffee already seems way too expensive.

At the local coffee shop, a “competitor” to Starbucks, the atmosphere makes up for the unbranded (but still expensive) coffee. The place has high ceilings, funky art (kind of), wood floors that need to be refinished, and a sofa that looks and feels like its previous stop was the boys dorm lounge of the local college.

Most visits, I drink plain old regular $2 coffee. In a mug. I never tip. But occasionally, I’ll splurge and request a cappuccino in a mug. I hesitate, inwardly, as I sign the debit card receipt: Should I add a tip?

My head screams no - I shouldn’t have spent this much money in the first place. My heart says, “Well, she doesn’t make much money making coffee in this ostensibly struggling small business. I bet she doesn’t get health insurance like the folks across the street at Starbucks.”

But my head always wins: The server is emotionally flat, barely grunts when I tell her my order, and never brings my foo-foo coffee to where I sit. There’s no real value to the service. The other day, about five minutes after I gave my order, the server essentially walked by the table where I was tapping away on my laptop and pointed back to the register, where my medium, frothy cappuccino sat: “Your drink is over there.” She wouldn’t bring it over, even though my table was on her way.

It ripped me that I had to get up and walk 7 paces to grab my cappuccino. Then I remembered that I didn’t tip her. I then asked myself, “Would she have brought me my cappuccino if I had tipped her?”

So, the question is, “If I’m the server, do I go the extra mile for only those people I think will tip me?” Or, do I serve everyone with the same level of service?

So much of, maybe all of, branding comes down to execution of the little things. It’s easy for pretty people in large conference rooms to wax on and off about branding. But branding comes down to the person on the front-line, who is or isn’t executing on the brand promise.

The person who answers the phone. The receptionist. The student who is leading your campus tours. The assistant who prints out your reports and sends them to the client. The person behind the counter at the cafeteria in the food court of your museum.

So does your assistant know how important his/her job is to the brand of your organization? Or, is she just doing “administration” work for $13 an hour?

I love Steve & Barry’s. I just bought two pairs of Starbury tennis shoes for my 12-year-old for $8.98 each. You get two trendy, colorful pairs of shoes that an NBA basketball star wears for work for only $19. I wanted to buy more - just because I could.

Steve & Barry’s is a recent addition to the world of sports apparel. In 2006, Steve & Barry’s recruited NBA® star Stephon Marbury to develop the Starbury™ Collection of urban-inspired apparel and footwear. The killer product is the Starbury II, a “high-performance basketball sneaker that Marbury wears on NBA® courts. The Starbury II boasts a sleek design and is engineered with the same comfort, stability, and durability found in basketball sneakers that retail between $100 and $150—and it’s just $14.98.”

That’s what Steve & Barry’s web site promised.

But I got the shoes for just $8.98. Each. Steve & Barry’s had a sale!

The Steve & Barry’s I visited was trashed. The shoe section had empty boxes strewn on the floor, mismatched shoes in boxes, 7 1/2 shoes in boxes that were marked size 10. And the clerks (who can’t be more than 19) shrugged their shoulders when I ask for help. “Yeah, it’s a mess here.” No apologies. No real anxiety.

And I wasn’t bothered by it, the prices too amazing.

Across the corridor in the mall, only 10 paces or so from Steve & Barry’s is another sports apparel store: Finish Line. It is filled with $70, $80, and $100 tennis shoes in boring colors, and other expensive sports apparel. The store was almost empty of customers when I walked by.

It must suck to be Finish Line. There’s no way you can sell your products for the same as Steve & Barrry’s. An upstart comes along and changes the rule. New companies don’t play by the same rules - ergo, that a tennis shoe has to be expensive to be fashionable. I don’t know yet whether the shoes are any good. And does that really matter?

At this point, traditional marketing itself doesn’t matter. Finish Line could spend millions trying to get customers into its store, but for what purpose? To buy boring, expensive, branded apparel? Good luck with that.

I realized that as I left Steve & Barry’s, with my 12-year-old ecstatic, that I had just experienced a “Purple Cow,” a phrase that marketer Seth Godin (www.sethgodin.com) writes and talks about. A Purple Cow is only a Purple Cow if the consumer experiences your product or mailer or service as a Purple Cow. You can’t talk your constituents or clients into thinking that what you are presenting them is exceptional. It either is or isn’t.