It has been a busy start of the year for the Starbucks marketing team. In a matter of days the company celebrated their 40th anniversary with a change on their logo, they introduced the Trenta - oversized cup, nationally launched the mobile payment system and made it by a landslide on the 2011 "Best Companies to Work For" list.
It looks like the mobile payment app system is part of an overall marketing campaign, where Starbucks is trying to create Brand Equity by reminding people why they loved Starbucks in first place: portraying Starbucks as a place that welcomes innovative ideas and that is geared towards fulfilling customer's needs even before the customer is aware of these needs in the first place.
In part, the call for increasing brand equity may come from the fact that the company suffered bad publicity during the hardest times of the economic downturn, where they had to close several hundreds of stores and fire thousands of people. The image of Starbucks being the “hip and original” coffee shop was substituted in some of their customers minds for the “cookie cut, over-priced big company coffee place". Perhaps, these new campaigns are an attempt to “go back to basics”, to the original notion of innovation, customer service and taking care of its people.
In the meantime, since it’s just been tested-out, we’ll have to wait and see how this new technology develops and what will be the costumer's impression when using it, but the marketing capabilities and ingenuity of the company definitely look very promising at least for the near future.
Sources:
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Starbucks-gives-logo-a-new-apf-1766882105.html?x=0&.v=3
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/bestcompanies/2011/full_list/
http://gizmodo.com/5735822/the-new-starbucks-trenta-cup-is-bigger-than-your-stomach
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Mobile-Payment-Debuts-bw-1926630830.html?x=0&.v=1
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/starbucks_corporation/index.html
I think that your point of view is really interesting and original. It is totally possible that Starbucks is using this innovation to appear as a pioneer in leading edge technologies to correspond with the type of clients is trying to attract, maintain or, as you state, regain. However, in my opinion, the idea is highly appealing. It could report benefits to customers and retailers by lowering fees charged. Also, this innovation has been around for a while in some European and Asian countries. The adoption of this new technology will depend in a lot of factors such as costs, security issues and receptivity of consumers. I think these will determine if it becomes a steady way of payment or just a temporary trendy way to pay for a coffee...
ReplyDeleteGida I liked reading you posting. Maybe Starbucks is doing some sort of campaign because of its 40th anniversary. But this is definitely new, and innovative. I read that this payment application is also being tested by Target in their California's stores. As Anibal commented I also think that this idea seems highly appealing and could be easily adopted by other business. In my opinion is going further than just a trendy way of paying coffee.
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