I fully understand the decision to simplufy the brand in order to use the logo across other products however, in my opinion the company should have adopted and approach similar to which Manchester United did when they came across the realisation that the brand & logo would be appearing on none football related items when they simply removed the 'Football Club' from their logo. Even though it was a bad day for football, (though I'm not going to address that here), the decision allow the Manchester United brand image to appear across a vast majority of mediums and products.

I feel that if Starbucks had just simply removed  'Coffee' from the logo the existing logo, as I've mocked up below. This would have kept the green and black circle combo which is what people recognise as the Starbucks logo and also allowed them the ability to place the logo across other non-coffee products. Also it will keep brand association with the products/stores that haven't been updated with the new logo, another problem with changing the logo completely is that stores that change early may suffer as people don't recognise it as a Starbucks any longer.  However only time will tell as to wether the new logo will become recognised by the product.

 

 

Previous Starbucks designs, & the new 'simple' Siren logo