Starbucks Digital Marketing in 2018

We are living in an era where the old mass audience is being replaced by smaller niche marketplace networks and the change in consumer behavior has urged brands to use digital media as a core method to do marketing (Lister et al. 2009). Digital media in general or social media allow business to build brand awareness the most effective than ever before by interacting with customers and listening to them. In this paper, research of Starbucks will be done to support the argument above, focusing on their digital media effort and verify the efficiency in using such tools in gaining brand health and consumer loyalty.

Starbucks is the largest American coffee company and coffeehouse chain offers handcrafted coffee and teas alongside with merchandises and fresh food in more than 24,000 retail stores in 70 countries (Starbucks 2018). It is commonly agreed that Starbucks has successfully created a trend integrated into their customers' lifestyle, but is it all because of the quality of their coffee? There are various reasons lead to Starbucks success, nevertheless, one of them is believed to be the accomplishment of embracing digital media and social listening.

Beside the product quality, Starbucks is also known for their proficient customer service. Consumers not only have access to a great source of information through Starbucks website and its official blog but also could interact with the brand through social media channels. Starbucks has an integrated marketing communications model. Beside their webpage, forum and blog, Starbucks also developed an application running on Android and IOS allowing users to keep in track with their member score and Starbucks upcoming products. They operate multimedia marketing by publishing videos on their YouTube channel. Starbucks’ directors accept interviews from business journals to strengthen their public relationship. Email marketing is also available through newsletter sent to Starbucks members. Starbucks accounts can be found on every prevailing social media platform including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, YouTube, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.

With more than 16 million followers on Instagram and more than 37 million fans on Facebook, Starbucks has a huge advantage to introduce their culture and new products to the audiences. It is observed that they leverage that advantage well. Latest features on Instagram such as story highlight is used to create sneak peaks of their upcoming products, share announcements or to collect information of the users by quiz templates.

Overview of Starbucks’s Social Media Statistic.

Starbucks’s updates on Facebook, interestingly, are less frequently compared to Instagram. However, Starbucks on Facebook is multilingual. The goal is to reach their customers in every country in the world, study their purchase behavior, find out their love and then create personalized content to meet their interest. The regional Facebook pages are localized and customized to fit the culture and demand of each region.

Although the content on social media is similar on every platform (which are posts about their products, staff, and stores), Starbucks offers a diversity of digital tools to target different audiences. For instance, Instagram and Pinterest provide the Millennials surveillance ability, response to the number one motive of Instagram users is the need to follow brands and other accounts (Sheldon and Bryant 2015). Meanwhile, Facebook and Twitter are used as a customer service tool. There is barely any comment goes unanswered. The marketing team of Starbucks tries to maintain this condition in order to build an impression that they do care about every customer and appreciate them to be a part of Starbucks community.

In February 2016, Starbucks hired previous Washington Post senior editor Rajiv Chandrasekaran to launch productions which could be constructive to American issues (Akopyan 2016). Later that year, a series called “Upstanders” was published on Starbucks’s YouTube channel and the written version was posted on their blog. “Upstanders” highlights ten stories told in written, video and podcast formats about “ordinary people doing extraordinary things to create positive change in their communities” (Chandrasekaran, cited in Akopyan 2016).

These series serve education purposes while promoting. “Upstanders”, however, is not Starbucks’s first effort to use storytelling as a tool to create marketing content. Earlier on YouTube channel and blog, Starbucks already had videos and posts feature the farmer and process to have a cup of coffee from the farm to the store. These value-added contents not only interest the audience but also educate and appeal to emotion, all to enrich their content and make the audiences keep subscribing Starbucks’s channels. Starbucks marketing channels, in overall, are effectively integrated. While its social media focusing on presenting the brand’s favorite products and provide information about coffee and tea recipe, Starbucks’s blog and YouTube channels are the value-added content sources. Series such as “Upstanders”, “Starbucks Job”, “Good feel Good” grant Starbuck a great opportunity to receive interest and trust from the consumers.

Lister et al. (2009) claim that interactivity is one of the most important factors and a value-added component of new media. It is essential to observe customers’ behavior, allow them to share, rate, and express their feeling or comment toward the brand and ensure their feedbacks are listened. Consumers nowadays require a wider range of choice and the brands need to fulfil that demand in order to compete with their competitors. Starbucks, in this case, has shown a great effort on maintaining customer relationship through social media by taking time to answer the majority of comments and publish content which potentially attracts customers.

The first platform to be investigated is Facebook on which Starbucks owns more than 37 million followers. As mentioned before, besides an official page, Starbucks in different regions run a regional Facebook page to be more effective in providing customers useful content and services. For instance, the general Starbucks page updates shortcut of “Upstanders” while Starbucks Brazil generates posts featuring mermaids and Starbucks Vietnam has advertised videos filmed at a famous local bar.

Except for the difference in languages, shared news and viral clips, other content still must meet a common framework, that is their products, stores, and staff must be presented and account for most posts. The pictures are mostly bright and colorful, combine with videos capturing enjoyable moments of people when experiencing Starbucks, the page brings the audience a fresh and dynamic feeling.

This ensures Starbucks’s audience to maintain and berry in mind the image of delicious food and beverage, friendly and lovely employees, sustainable and environment-friendly atmosphere link with the name Starbucks. The other strength of Starbucks on Facebook is that they succeed in operating a consistent franchise system. The quality of service, post, and response from every regional page is equal.

Starbucks also creates eye-catching, relevant, and timely content on almost every social media base. Their content focus on evaluating social issues and sustainability. Starbucks is building an image of a sustainable brand which cares about the community and environment. These efforts somehow explained the brand loyalty Starbucks in different geographic segments.

The next social media type to be observed is Instagram. It is crucial for brands to be aware of the importance of contributing to this platform since the number of the Instagram user is rising result from the affiliation with Facebook. Thus, Sheldon and Bryant (2016) in a paper study of Instagram claim that the highest motive of Instagram users is to follow and gain knowledge of brands and other users. Understanding this behavior, Starbucks focus on generating rich and splashy photographs, which, according to Bakhshi et al. (2015), are more likely to be noticed. Sheldon and Bryant also argue that when people want to save a memory of their experiences, they are more likely to post on Instagram than other social media. For example, in the case of Starbucks, the brand creates hashtags and encourage users to use them. In fact, Starbucks is widely considered as a cool and popular brand that people show their “style” by posting a cup of Frappuccino or checking in a Starbucks store. By that mean, Starbucks is advertised free of charge and generate the word-of-mouth marketing.

According to Hu at al. (2014), there are eight main categories of photos on Instagram. They are friend: posts have two or more faces; food: posts of food or drinks, recipe; gadget: any objects like car, tool, household application; captioned photo: photos of quotes or meme; pet: animals are the main object of the photo; activity: post of outdoor or indoor experiences; selfie: posts of user taking photo of themselves and fashion: post of outfits or clothing items. In this case of Starbucks, there are no posts of captioned photos, fashion, and selfie. It is hard to define which cluster of user Starbuck belong to.

Starbucks Instagram’s interface is overwhelmed by posts of Starbucks’ cups. Following by snacks and portraits of customers. The remarkable note is that photos appear on Starbucks Instagram are all filtered with warm color temperature, boost contrast and increase exposure. This results in an eye-catching display for the account and attracts the majority of users to like and comment (Bakhshi et al. 2015). The products posts are similar to those on Facebook pages, however since this is a photography platform, other photos of pets, adorable objects and people are added.

The final social media platform to be discussed is Twitter. Starbucks Twitter is mainly used to communicate with American customers. Their posts are similar to the Instagram ones. However, Starbuck on Twitter is also used as the customer service tool, focusing on answering complaints and questions of consumers and updating news

Leeflang et al. (2013) argue that one of the challenges business would face in the digital generation is to manage brand health with social media, in the other world, to raise and maintain the brand awareness and brand accepted level. According to Leeflang and other authors, there are five methods usually used to manage brand health. First of all is the most common method used by 49% of the firms, that is to create value-added content or service on social media, blogs or website. Starbucks has managed to provide various sources of value-added content on their channels. Besides education-purpose series such as “Upstanders” on Youtube, their webpage provides social impact knowledge such as news and information about the community, ethical source, and environment.

Starbucks saves customers’ time and effort by sending newsletters with information their customers may need but do not have time to find. Starbucks’ members receive their promotions and awards or new products to be launch. However, in some regional website, there is no sign-up function. It may benefit Starbucks even more if they could pay attention to improve this inconvenience.

There are also videos on their YouTube channels which feature insights of their coffee beans. There are also introduce clips sharing methods to prepare different kinds of drink. Starbucks also shares some of their research on Starbuck Chanel, a forum where coffee lovers gather and share stories.

Nowadays people seem not interested in reading such long, complicated reports, infographics are great tools to provide audience knowledge of the brand. On the forum Starbuck Newsroom, Starbucks provides fact sheets and infographic about their activities and summary of their financial and operating results. Their annual reports are also easily found for potential partners and investors.

Another approach to manage brand health is observing brand mention and identify negative messages straightforwardly (Leeflang et al. 2013). As mentioned before, Starbucks has trained its employees to generate as many responses as possible, both positive and negative.

Starbucks usually ask customers with complaints message them directly to explain the situation. A large number of cases could be solved, however, there are still a number of customers did not receive the arrangement they expect. For instance, Starbucks is facing several critical recently accusing their racial discrimination attitude. Starbucks posted their apologies on Instagram and Twitter, however only replied to encouraging comments and did not give any further explain to those angry comments under the posts. Besides replying to all the comments, the brand needs to pay more attention to taking words into action.

Leeflang et al. (2013) also mention brand health can be managed by cooperating with social influencers and making them the brand representatives. Starbucks, on the other hand, does not weigh down this method. They focus on evaluating social values and giving back to the community instead, by generating community service campaign, developing food share model and giving education as well as job opportunities to those who need.

In conclusion, digital marketing strategy plays a great role in Starbucks' success. Starbucks maintains to keep effective interaction with their customers and try to ensure the customers’ satisfaction. Moreover, the brand has assembled its very unique reputation, based on their product quality and digital media achievement. Starbucks segments their target audience and develops substances to meet each division's interest. Starbucks concentrates on using storytelling as the marketing strategy, offering educational and emotional content. The more brands entertain their audiences, the likelier they are to keep subscribing brands' activities (College 2017). Although Starbucks has done a great job in communicating with customers on social media, there is still a challenge left for the organization, that is to ensure their physical service reflects the works they have been doing on online platforms.

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References list:

Article and Lecture:

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Images and Video:

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