Generation 'Like for a Like'

Dear Mr. Fisk and Board,

I would like to bring to your attention an exciting opportunity which I firmly believe that Starbucks should take advantage of. In my years of working for this company, I have observed significant growth, however I think here at Starbucks, we have unused capacity and haven’t reached our full potential in reaching out to our consumers and the people who should be our consumers but aren’t yet because we haven’t worked hard enough to persuade them to join us.

If you’ve kept up with the people drinking your coffee and buying your foods, you will observe that the age of Starbucks consumers is steadily decreasing, and I believe we need to adapt to suit our target audience. Coffee is for everyone, but the brilliance and variety found in our bistros appeals especially to teens and young adults, and there is one thing that connects these people and that is social networking.

I’m sure by this time you’ve heard of the ‘Ice Bucket Challenge’, ‘Rickrolling’ or GoPro’s renowned video of a skateboarding cat. These three phenomena seem strange or unorthodox, however this is the power that social media has in today’s society. With the right creativity, which I very well know our company has, we can pick up a storm on social media, thus improving our consumer base and ultimately increasing sales and success. 

Today’s world is centred around ‘likes’, ‘follows’, ‘retweets’ and ‘shares’: imaginary things that are as simple as a click of a button, but have the potential to provide unlimited amounts of data. 14-year-old Jade from Dubai loves the new ‘Pumpkin Spice Triple Mocha Extra Shot Cappumochaccino with Double Caramel Cream and Soy Milk’? Why not let her friends know by ‘tweeting’ about how it kicks off her day and ‘following’ the official Starbucks Facebook page to let us know?

Social media is like nothing we have ever seen before. Never have consumers been able to interact with us so easily, and interact with their friends to build the consumer base even further. These days, as a large corporation, if you aren’t heavily invested and involved in social media, you are missing out and will be left in the dust.

In this way, our consumers are part of our campaign. They don’t even have to enjoy Starbucks coffee, but if we can convince them to share our content – whether it is an ad, a competition, a collaboration, anything – we suddenly have an influx of people all around the world seeing our products and brand and associating them with success, creativity, humour etc. This is the kind of relationship that is vital for the success of our business, and is imperative for further development.

Put simply, the benefits of social media campaigning and interactivity outweighs all other methods of advertisement in today’s society, and investing in it today would not only improve our relations with consumers, renownedness and data collection, but also encourage further development and open new opportunities (e.g. fan ideas from competitions and consumer input), undoubtedly leading to success for years to come.

I hope you consider my preposition which seems to be a step forward for Starbucks.

Kind Regards,

Ben Thomson

Starbucks Marketing Associate