Starbucks: First Class Service Building Trust, Leading with Courage!
Starbucks is the world’s largest coffeehouse chain. Wherever you go, you can find a Starbucks. What brought such great global success? Marketing exists to help organizations understand, reach, and deliver value to their customers. For this reason, the customer is considered the cornerstone of marketing. Starbucks has remained true to its mission and vision, and in return, customers remain loyal. Moreover, customers trust that Starbucks will remain consistent in its promise.
Starbucks was a pioneer in experiential marketing, creating that “third place,” a welcoming place outside of our home and work where people can connect over a cup of coffee. However, Starbucks has not sat back to ride on its initial success revolutionizing the neighborhood coffee experience. Instead, Starbucks continually finds ways to innovate and connect more with its customers.
In 2008, Starbucks launched the ‘My Starbucks Idea’ platform. It was created to engage customers and to encourage their ideas on the Starbucks experience. The platform gives customers insight into what the company is doing and makes them feel like an insider. At the fifth anniversary of the site launch (2013), My Starbucks Idea had generated more than 150,000 ideas, and the company had implemented 277 of those ideas. The transparency built into the website, with a section dedicated to ideas that have been recommended to key decision-makers and the up-to-date status of those projects, adds a sense of trust that the idea is not simply being sent into a black box. The crowdsourcing website is helping the company build engagement and stay receptive to its customers’ needs while helping drive the innovation engine within the company.
One of Starbucks ‘ innovations was the Facebook Leaf Rakers Society, where Starbucks created a virtual community around people’s pumpkin-spice passion, then stood back and let its most dedicated customers connect. By doing this and allowing people to talk to each other, Starbucks understood what their most loyal followers were talking about. That deepens the customer relationship gives the company a way to listen to its customers and provide meaningful connections with the brand, and Starbucks continues to look for ways to innovate to make sure it keeps a unique point of view.
In the loyalty world, Starbucks has consistently been cited as having one of the best rewards programs. As of October 2020, the Starbucks Rewards program has over 19.3 million members and generates nearly 50% of its revenue. To create the best possible experience for customers, they turned to Formation’s Offer Optimization Platform enabling the real-time creation of each customer’s offer, which means the actions and rewards are unique to each customer. Using Formation, Starbucks has been able to take data from a variety of sources — from transaction and loyalty programs to product and store information — to learn more about each customer and automatically tailor offers to their unique needs and preferences.
I believe that brands like Starbucks are based on a customer-centric foundation, and they have cultivated a culture within their company that puts the customer at the center of everything they do. For instance, decisions related to what products to make, the design of the stores, website and apps, operations, and staff training are all made through that lens. Moreover, there are many moving parts in achieving trust, and Starbucks has covered these trust-building bases, which include transparency, showing real value, developing credibility and reputation, providing incentives and security. In addition, all Starbucks corporate offices and retail stores closed for racial-bias training in 2018, which led to customers’ trust in believing that Starbucks stores embody the company’s values and mission by providing a welcoming, comfortable environment for its customers. Furthermore, to overcome the COVID-19 crisis, Starbucks quickly pivoted from the “third place” to in-store pick-ups and drive-thru.
In conclusion, Starbucks’ customer-centered business model is thought-provoking. Like Starbucks, every business must understand to remain successful. It must openly and objectively evaluate every aspect of itself to adapt to the new consumer. Customer experiences built on trust are crucial to creating customer engagement, loyalty, and increased revenue. Moreover, Starbucks’ loyalty to its customers shows how a company can rebound and grow by directly connecting with the consumer, an important lesson for any business in today’s consumer-centric market.
