Starbucks Just ‘Gets’ Mobile
Freshly named Mobile Marketer’s ‘2010 Mobile Marketer Of The Year‘ – Starbucks continues to make the right moves, on the right platforms, with the right people – their customers. I’ve written about Starbucks multiple times on this site in the last couple of years, giving them loads of credit for the way that they effectively market their brand while keeping in mind that their main role is how to best service their customers.
The thing that impresses me most about Starbucks is their willingness to ‘try’ things. They have developed a culture of innovation surrounding how they market to, and embrace their customers. A key quote from the Mobile Marketer article inspired the title of this post:
“Starbucks taps mobile for the medium’s strengths: location, timeliness and immediacy, convenience and measurability,”
5 words – 4 important to the customer, 1 very important to Starbucks (measurability).
They are clearly customer centric, with the aim to 1) Make it easy on their customer to do business with them 2) Make the experience relevant and, most importantly 3) Build an intense level of loyalty with their patrons.
What better way to accomplish those things listed above than to create a set of tools that are with you all the time, on the computing device you use most often? Your phone. This device provides an opportunity for Starbucks to interact with their patrons multiple times a day, providing them an enhanced experience with a product they clearly love, and (this is important to a marketer) get real time data about those people and how they interact with your brand in a non-intrusive and invisible fashion. People are willingly interacting with Starbucks because they are getting perceived value from their experience on their mobile device. Well done, Starbucks – you’ve set the bar.