How do you revive a global chain of coffee houses that once defined the “alternative” Gen-X lifestyle, but that now seems like just another bloated megacorporation?

Answer: Put naked breasts in the logo.

This, at least, appears to be the thinking at Starbucks Corporation, which has quietly changed its logo over recent weeks from an abstract mermaid-like squiggle to a brazen, bare-chested, open-legged siren.

The company — whose stock price has more than halved over the past two years — insists that the new logo is merely part of a temporary promotion.

But critics are not buying it. Neither are they buying any more non-fat double-shot grande soy mocha lattes.

A San Diego-based Christian group, The Resistance, has already called on its 3,000 members to boycott the chain, whose mass expansion has threatened to turn its once hip coffee lounges into McDonald's-style fast-food outlets.

“The Starbucks logo has a naked woman on it with her legs spread like a prostitute,” said Mark Dice, the group's founder. “Need I say more? The company might as well call itself Slutbucks.”

Undeterred, Starbucks says that the logo will appear on its cups - the company's shopfront insignia has not been changed - for “several more weeks” and will live on indefinitely as the logo of its Pike Place bags of coffee.

The new logo is a toned-down version of the far more explicit mermaid-based design that hung above the first Starbucks when it was opened in Seattle's Pike Place Market in 1971.

Then, Starbucks was run by two hippy teachers and a writer, who considered selling anything but unground beans to be a sell-out. They changed their minds in 1987 when they sold their company to a former employee, Howard Schultz, who ended up opening 8,500 outlets worldwide.

During the Clinton era, Starbucks became one of the most successful brands in history, part of the aspirational, white, college-graduate, yuppie lifestyle promoted by the TV sitcom Friends. In the 1999 film Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, the comic villain Dr Evil takes over the world because his second-in-command buys shares in Starbucks (a $50,000 investment in Starbucks in 1992 would have been worth $2.8 million by 2006).

In Mr Schultz's bestselling 1999 memoir Pour Your Heart into It: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time, he explains that the original logo was inspired by “a 16th Century Norse woodcut: a two-tailed mermaid, or siren, encircled by the store's original name, Starbucks Coffee, Tea, and Spice...bare-breasted and Rubenesque, [it] was supposed to be as seductive as coffee itself”. As for the company's name, it was taken from Starbuck, Captain Ahab's first mate in Moby-Dick, as well as the turnof-the-century mining camp Starbo on Washington's Mount Rainier.

Starbucks first attempted to revive its original logo in 2006 to mark the chain's 35th anniversary, but concern over how the mermaid would be received in some states resulted in the promotion being limited to the liberal Northwest. Regardless, one school district in Washington banned Starbucks coffee cups unless the siren's nipples were hidden behind a cupholder.

Hence the toned-down redesign for 2008, in which the mermaid's nipples are obscured by her flowing locks. According to this week's Advertising Age, the company was so worried that the word “nipples” was banned during logo redesign meetings.

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