Meagan Meldrim

ADV 420Fall 2011

The Business

• Starbucks sells:– Gourmet coffee– Coffee drinks– And other products (Cd’s, mugs, etc.)

• They target primarily:– Coffee lovers– Business people on the go– And college students

Challenges

• Competition (Biggby, etc.)

• Brining in new business

• Keeping customers loyal to the Starbucks brand

• Branching out to new market areas

• Expanding globally

• Starbucks has done an excellent job of:– Using social media to promote its

business– Keeping their products new and

continuing to expand on their market and bring in new customers

• Starbucks’ new goal needs to be to target a specific demographic of its customers and expand that.

Mar

keti

ng

T

hem

e

A New Season

Starbucks often has seasonal promotions– Custom beverages during the holiday season

(Thanksgiving and Christmas) is its largest venture in this area

Starbucks needs

to look at another

“season” which

they could use to

profit upon.

This “season” needs to be finals week around college campuses.

Study Time• College students across the country use coffee shops as a place to study,

especially during finals week.

• It has also been documented that students’ use of social media sites like Facebook increases during finals week as students use these sites as a means of procrastination.

• Starbucks needs to make students pick their coffee shop to study in– What better way to do that than to convince them via social media sites

like Facebook?• When students go to a coffee shop to study, they often spend several hours

there and will purchase multiple items. – This is different than the average customer who may be meeting a friend

for one drink.

• If Starbucks creates online promotions via Facebook (a site that students are going to be actively checking) such as coupons stating “50% off any beverage of your choice,” students are likely to go into Starbucks and buy their one discounted beverage – and then stay there to study and continue to purchase items at full price.

Putting it into Action

• Starbucks already has their Facebook pages broken down to specific locations.

• This will make it easier for locations in large college towns (ex. East Lansing) to hone in on when finals weeks are specifically taking place and start up these online coupon promotions during exam weeks.

• Another way to create online hype is for Starbucks to encourage its customers to “check-in” on Facebook for special promotions and discounts.– This will alert other Facebook users that their friend is

studying at Starbucks and will cause them to consider studying their as well – ultimately drawing in more business.

Measuring Success

• There are 2 ways you will be able to measure the success of this marketing campaign.

• Firstly, by looking at if the number of “likes” on specific Starbucks location fan pages increases during finals week on college campuses when these special promotions are taking place and if the number of “check-ins” increases.

• Secondly, you will be able to look at shops located in large college towns and see if sales increase during their specific exam week.

Long-term Success

• How you will know if this campaign is truly successful comes in 2 ways as well:

• Firstly, if Starbucks locations see a general increase in sales after these promotions end, then Starbucks has created a new customer base.

• Secondly, if this marketing campaign is successful and increases in success during each subsequent finals week – then not only is the campaign successful but the use of Facebook is successfully helping spread the information of this promotion.

Logistics• There are obviously 2 major exam weeks across the country – at

the end of Fall and Spring semesters, i.e. early December and early May.

• Advertisements for these promotions thus need to go into effect during late November and May.

• The marketing of this promotion itself will not cost anything as Facebook is a free site and it will not cost anything for the company to post things about their special finals week deals. (Note: Starbucks will NOT be buying Ad space on Facebook, they will be making use of their fan pages.)

• Starbucks, however, will need to allocate money for coupons, with the notion in mind that sales will increase overall during and after this promotion.