Reasons why Starbucks invests in mobile apps

Starbucks is well-known for investing heavily in mobile apps. This blog post from Digital Turbine explains quite well why Starbucks does it. The post refers to other sources and doesn’t really deliver anything new, but it summarizes the business reasons nicely.

Starbucks: A Case Study in Effective Mobile App Marketing

Read the blog post about Starbuck’s mobile app reasoning.

Take-aways:

• Special offers and loyalty programs have been the key to adoption — and those have always been very core to Starbucks, so bringing their loyalty program into digital is a logical move for them. They didn’t really do that much new stuff with mobile apps in the end.
• Mobile ordering and payment is also a key component of their strategy since peak hours are a critical area in their business. Making the transaction as smooth and fast as possible is very core to Starbucks.
• Starbucks is in many ways the perfect candidate for investing in mobile applications: 1) customers interact with Starbucks often, even several times per day, 2) loyalty is a key component in their business and customers also get personal benefits for being a loyal customer, 3) transactions have several steps (custom orders, payment, waiting, picking up the product) and each step involves quite a bit of self-service (ideally at least).