Last week I wrote about Starbuck’s attempt to reach out to customers and prospects for constructive feedback and new product ideas. In Tuesday’s Boston Globe they ran an insert (with attached card, see below) that made the following offer: Come in to Starbucks on Wednesday’s for the next six weeks, and receive a free tall Pike Place Roast coffee. Pike Place Roast is their new smoother blend that was requested by many of the suggestions on the site. It is a great tactic to use custom media to get new and lapsed customers into stores and try their new coffee. I have to believe this promotion was focused at people like me who prefer the taste of Dunkin Donuts and do not regularly shop at Starbucks. Six weeks of free coffee can get someone hooked and make a stop at Starbucks part of their regular routine. Most importantly, it gets the product into people’s hands. All the “branding” and expensive TV ads in the world can’t guarantee that.
In the interest of marketing science I went to my local Starbucks yesterday morning to test their offer and taste the new blend. It was the typical Starbucks experience with lots of earnest, serious people sitting around with no particular place to go at 8:30am on a week day. I strode up to the baristas and ordered my tall Pike Place Roast and flashed my card. I guess the card identified me a newbie since my barista felt compelled to thoughtfully point out that “tall” means “small”. It was probably the best coffee I ever had at Starbucks, not as good as Dunkin Donuts, but much improved.
It is interesting to see their private media channel come full circle from soliciting advice from their customers to putting a program in place to put their words into action. I will give it a shot the next few weeks and let them try and convert me. Maybe some day I will actually know what Venti means.