Starbucks VIA® Pumpkin Spice Flavored Coffee Was a Consumer’s Idea
Customers spoke, Starbucks listened, sales soared.
Have you taken a sip of a pumpkin spice latte recently? Love it and can’t wait for the option in your mobile app? Or, hate it and just want your extra hot, oat milk latte like usual? For many, it’s hard to imagine fall without the Starbucks staple. Since the drink debuted in 2003, over 600 million cups have been sold. That is over $3 BILLION worth of coffee sold, all because of a little seasonal pumpkin flavoring! 😵💫 What you probably didn’t know is that Starbucks VIA® Pumpkin Spice Flavored Coffee didn’t come from some internal Starbuck’s think-tank; it came from a consumer just like you.
My Starbucks Ideas
In 2008, founder Howard Shultz introduced the “My Starbucks Idea’’ platform with the hopes of using consumer feedback to make the company’s beloved products even better (one year after the iPhone debuted.) Shultz recognized the value of not only listening to customers, but getting them excited about the future of Starbucks and making them feel heard and listened to when it came to helping the company grow. “We need to put ourselves in the shoes of our customers,” Schultz said at the time. “That is my new battle cry. Live and breathe Starbucks the way our customers do.”
“My Starbucks Idea” wasn’t your average dropbox for suggestions. The platform was designed as an online forum, where coffee lovers were able to create, categorize, and post their ideas. To make the platform even more dynamic and establish a method of identifying the most popular ideas, users were able to comment and “upvote” other people’s posts. Based on upvotes and comments, a leaderboard feature would rank the most diehard Starbucks fans and the most popular ideas. (tangent: wonder how this drove the upvote features in other apps like product hunt, etc.).
Fans submitted over 150,000 responses in the first five years, with hundreds being actually brought to life by the company. Think back to the last time you stopped by Starbucks with your laptop to cram for your next meeting. Free wifi was idea #3 from the My Starbucks Idea platform. Enjoy pre-ordering your iced Vanilla Latte on your phone before picking it up from the drive through? Mobile drive through orders were another consumer’s idea. Then of course there’s the Holy Grail of fantastic ideas — Idea #233: Pumpkin Spiced Latte VIA home powder blend. 🤤 Where would we be without her?
The Power of Qualitative Data
Though the site closed in June 2018, this project still proves to be a prime example of the power of collecting qualitative consumer feedback. After nearly a decade, the site had over 190,000 ideas submitted, 2,000,000 votes placed, and 277 ideas implemented. Innovation is what drove Starbucks to be the top competitor in the coffee industry, and in this case that innovation wasn’t born out of hard numbers or statistics, but subjective qualitative feedback in the form of direct responses from the people that mattered the most: Starbucks customers.
At Resultid, we believe that all data has a story to tell. We’ve collected feedback from hundreds of interviews to drive the purpose of our product to unlock the story buried in qualitative data. But, having collected a veritable mountain of information, we were faced with the question of how to efficiently analyze and utilize it. So, we designed an app to help users (and ourselves) uncover the compelling stories within qualitative data, to efficiently drive better business decisions. Using the app, it took us only five minutes to translate hours of interviews into insights, which continue to guide our product today. We’ve enjoyed running similar analyses on popular interests like Love Island tweets, Spotify reviews, and Puerto Rican Beach reviews, to demonstrate how analyzing feedback from consumers can help leaders create a solid business strategy. 😁
Qualitative data has a place in every business decision. Although it is more challenging to collect and analyze, failing to do so can put your company in jeopardy of missing out on a billion-dollar idea, like the iconic idea #1: splash sticks that keep your clothes clean while you’re stirring your drink. Concerned that people won’t have the time or care to leave feedback? According to a study by Brightlocal, 72% of customers will write a review if a local business asks them to. Therefore, having a convenient platform or space dedicated to asking your consumers for feedback is crucial to acquiring that essential data. So, the next time you’re sitting in Starbucks with the Pumpkin Spice Latte and cake pop that you pre-ordered with the mobile app, using their free wifi, enjoying the satisfyingly coordinated experience of it all, just remember that those things came from consumers like you, and a company that not only values your feedback, but knows how to use it. If Starbucks can revolutionize its business with customer feedback, imagine all the ways analyzing qualitative data can transform yours (with help from the right tools of course. 😉)
A blog on the importance of customer feedback wouldn’t be complete if we didn’t ask for some ourselves. Check out our app and send questions, comments, raves and rants to bertie@resultid.com! Your feedback drives our product to be the best it can be, and we appreciate your input always. ❤️
