1. INTRODUCTION
There are thousands of coffee shops in the world, but no one, like Starbucks,
has been so successful. As we know, Starbucks is an American
coffee company and coffeehouse chain. It is the largest coffeehouse company in
the world. As of September 2015, Starbucks has 22,766 stores in 65 countries and territories, including 12,802 in the United States, 1,930 inChina, 1,409 in Canada, 1,121 in Japan and 825 in the United Kingdom. Today,
Starbucks is no doubt a famous brand all over the world.
More about the history...
Though it is the largest coffeehouse company in the world, Starbucks is
still a young company for 46 years, compared to other fast food giants (McDonald’s
60 years, KFC 85 years, and Dunkin' Donuts 65 years).
Starbucks began in 1971. Three students at the University of San Francisco were
inspired to sell high-quality coffee beans and equipment by coffee roasting
entrepreneur Alfred Peet after he taught them
his style of roasting beans. (Pendergrast, pp. 252–53) In the early time, Starbucks only sold roasted
whole coffee in 1912 Pike Place Market in Seattle, Washington. Until in 1987, Howard Schultz became the CEO of Starbucks, who rebranded
Starbucks and quickly began to expand new markets and products. Between 1987 and 2007,
Starbucks opened on average two new stores every day. Today, Starbucks has more
than 22,000 retail stores all over the world, serving millions of customers with various products, more than coffee.
This video can guid us to see the company's history, concept and culture.
2. MARKETING STRATEGY
What makes Starbucks so special? Their success cannot live without the unique marketing
strategy. According to the information on Starbucks official website, some of their
best marketing strategies are outlined below.
• Perfect Cup of Coffee – Starbucks places a huge
emphasis on product quality.
• Third Place – Starbucks focuses on
creating a “third place” between home and work, a unique and relaxing
“experience” and “atmosphere” for people.
• Customer
Satisfaction – Customer satisfaction is a very important issue with
Starbucks.
• Creating
a Starbucks Community –The Starbucks creates a community around their brand.
• Innovation – Starbucks thinks up
creative and innovative ideas to add to their products or services.
• Brand Marketing – Starbucks always focuses on “word-of-mouth” advertising and
letting the high quality products and services speak for themselves.
• Starbucks
opens stores in main big cities.
• Target consumers:
18-45 year olds; youngsters who want to gather with their friends; Office
workers and students who need to catch up with their work; Those who feel that
drinking coffee is “cool”; People who are adventurous, willing to try new
things.
3. SOCIAL MEDIA OVERVIEW
I was shocked when I look at the social media of Starbucks. It is crushing
social media! Let’s look at these numbers:
• 35.94 million Facebook
likes
• 10.2 million Twitter
followers
• 6 million Instagram followers
• 216.3K Pinterest
followers
• 83K YouTube
subscribers
• 4.21 million Google+
followers
• 6.14 million Linkedin
followers
Amazing job! Those numbers are staggering but well-earned. How do they
do it? Let’s take a look.
a. Website
Starbucks website |
Starbucks has a rather strong web presence, utilizing many different
platforms in order to reach their consumers and provide information in various
ways. On it’s main website, Starbucks continually changes the landing page to
coincide with a current promotion that they might be offering. In fact, right
now the landing page is about the campaign “One treefor Every Bag”.
Starbucks shop online web page |
b. Facebook
Incredibly, Starbucks replied every comment including positive and
negative.
c. Twitter
Starbucks doesn’t update Twitter all the time, but they do post unique
content. Checking out Starbucks’ Twitter page, it’s visible that most of the
tweets are directed at users. They use Twitter as a service to reach out to
customers talking about their in-store or product experiences.
For example, one follower named Sophie tweeted her disappointment with the coffee shop after she got a cup with the name “Sue”. Starbucks replied, “@Sophs_Ritchie Sorry about that, Sophie! ”
In fact, many of their tweets start with “sorry about that!” or “sorry to hear!,” offering dismayed customers solutions to their problems. Instead of losing disgruntled customers, Starbucks directly responds, solving the issues and making sure that customers are, in the end, satisfied! Because people want their voices to be heard.
d. Pinterest and Instagram
Starbucks really shines on visually-oriented social sites like Pinterest and Instagram, where they can post appealing photos to attract eyeballs.
The company maintains 20 Pinboards featuring coffee recipes, tea recipes,
Starbucks reserve, flavored coffee creations, pumpkin spice latte, Frappuccino,
food, Starbucks cup art, store design .... The boards are full of fantastic
images that are almost entirely sourced from third-party sites. I think this is
an important part creating a successful Pinterest strategy.
Instagram is an assortment of cool images related to the coffee culture. Same as Pinterest, Starbucks’
Instagram also lets its followers primarily control the content. The vast
majority of the images on Starbucks’ account are fan-submitted images from
locations around the globe. Starbucks encourage followers to post their own
Starbucks photos, along with a campaign-focused hashtag to connect the visual
content back to the brand.
e. Others: YouTube, Google+, Linkedin
YouTube
There are 265 videos on Starbucks YouTube Channel. The videos are
classified in different contents, such as Starbucks partners, Starbucks jobs,
spots, giving back, Frappuccino, tea, coffee Q&A, music … Over 83k people
subscribe to Starbucks YouTube Channel.
Google+
On Starbucks Google+ pages, Starbucks have more than four million
followers. All of the posts content is taken from Starbucks’ Facebook page and
Twitter feed, though there’s nothing drastically wrong with this tactic.
Starbucks also have Linkedin. We can see lots of information about the
company, culture and job posted. There are more than 6.14 million followers. Some
are employees, and some are those who are just interested in the jobs or
company.
Whatever social
media platforms Starbucks use, the messages they posted are positive, creative, funny, personalized. And the tone is widely from funny to heartwarming to
quirky to artsy, but always reflects their brand personality. What mostly
impressed me is the high frequency of interaction between the company and
followers. On Facebook, Starbucks replied every comment! On Twitter, they also
have lots of interaction to followers.
4. CURRENT METRICS
a. Social Mention
Judging from the data on the Social Mention anytime, it is good to see the strength (the likelihood that the brand is being discussed in social media) is 66%, which indicates most people are talking about Starbucks on the social media. And the sentiment (the ratio of positive to negative) is positive and neutral, and the reach (a measure of the range of influence) is 50%.
People can use many key words to find Starbucks, but the most common word is the name Starbucks. According to the listed sources, Starbucks appears in many different kinds of social media, the famous social media is Photobucket and Twitter. Moreover, this brand will be mentioned every 40 seconds in the Internet. That’s really a hot word.
b. Google Trends
According to Google Trends, we can see that the interest of Starbucks is
increasing gradually during the past ten years. The growth is very stable in a
big picture.
Starbucks is very popular in its
homeland---United States. It is also popular in Singapore, Canada, Philippines
and Hong Kong, because Starbucks stores are mainly located at big cities in
developed districts.
c. Meltwater IceRocket
This graph from Ice Rocket shows the Daily Blogs
Citation Trend of the term "Starbucks" in the last month.
Clearly, the term Starbucks is a hot word, having averages 312.13 posts per
day.
5. CONCLUSION
Above all, I can see that Starbucks is not only a coffee company giant, but also a social media giant. Starbucks has a presence on most of the major social media sites including Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube, Google Plus and Linkedin. In addition to these well-known social media, Starbucks has special marketing campaigns, its own online community – My Starbucks Idea, and even mobile applications. (I’m going to explore more about that in monitoring 2) I can say that Starbucks has fully embraced the power that social media technologies have provided businesses.
Above all, I can see that Starbucks is not only a coffee company giant, but also a social media giant. Starbucks has a presence on most of the major social media sites including Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube, Google Plus and Linkedin. In addition to these well-known social media, Starbucks has special marketing campaigns, its own online community – My Starbucks Idea, and even mobile applications. (I’m going to explore more about that in monitoring 2) I can say that Starbucks has fully embraced the power that social media technologies have provided businesses.
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