For example, by locating stores near dry cleaners and video rental stores, it takes full advantage of the commuter traffic generated from people dropping off clothes at the dry cleaners on their way to work and picking up movies from video rental stores on their way home.
The same goes for other specialty food shops. The presence of a Starbucks doesn’t mean that local bagel shops, or even mom and pop coffeehouses, will close down. In fact, as Howard Schultz points out in Pour Your Heart Into It, a Starbucks store will actually help other businesses like it, bringing more people to the area, educating them on the specialty coffee market, and providing them with another place to get together. And because Starbucks puts great effort into researching prime locations, other businesses often base their own real estate decisions around where Starbucks locates its stores.
The principle around locationing as advertising is basic, and, in most cases, basic works. Location—it’s not just meant for the real estate game anymore.
Leading Questions …
What impression does your business location give to your customers?
How might you better use your business location strategy as a marketing tool to increase brand awareness and drive sales?
How does the location of your business positively or negatively impact the other businesses around it? How could your business change to cause a more positive impact?
How can we communicate in an honest way, and crack the code of what this human emotion is without looking like a Tide commercial?
HOWARD SCHULTZ
(internal Starbucks presentation, Seattle)
Marketing 101 teaches us to focus on communicating the benefits—as opposed to the features—when promoting a product. By promoting just the feature—for example, a laptop equipped with wi-fi—a marketer is talking more about the product than the experience. The benefit of having a wi-fi-enabled laptop, Marketing 101 would tell us, is being able to connect wirelessly to the Internet. Great. However, savvy marketers realize that there are a number of layers separating the product feature from the ultimate experience the customer hopes to achieve.
To better engage customers with marketing communication that fosters an experiential and emotional relationship, Starbucks focuses on communicating the benefit of the benefit of everything it offers.
In other words, what’s the benefit of the benefit of the latest Starbucks Hear Music CD compilation featuring emerging and enduring musicians? The benefit of the benefit is that Starbucks customers will become viewed as more the music mavens with their friends because they have been made hip to tasty tunes.
What’s the benefit of the benefit of a Gingerbread Latte? Traditional marketing stops at the flavor as the benefit—after all, Starbucks is obsessed with the flavor of its beverages. But what does the flavor really accomplish for the person tasting it. The benefit of the benefit of this ginger-and-cinnamon-spiced latte is that its taste will transport the customer to a simpler, more innocent time of holiday glee as only a child can revel in. Starbucks knows its customers don’t simply buy a cup of coffee. They buy the experience that Starbucks delivers of drinking a cup of coffee in a cozy, relaxing atmosphere. Customers don’t just buy a pound of Kenya beans, they buy the feeling of an afternoon around the campfire after a day in safari; they don’t merely buy a cup of Breakfast Blend, they buy the laid-back feelings that come with sharing a lazy Sunday morning with loved ones.
The benefit of the benefit puts customers in the place they want to be. It makes the product personal. It’s relayed to consumers through the in-store signage, the art on the packaging, the names of the drinks, and the marketing brochures.
But Starbucks goes beyond communicating the benefit of the benefit to just customers—it does the same with its employees. Baristas are trained to talk about coffee in deeply personally ways and not just in basic, literal ways. So instead of using confusing terms like “vibrant acidity” or “elegantly medium-bodied,” baristas are taught to describe coffees using the emotional connotations they feel when tasting and smelling coffees. For example, one barista might describe the soothing rich taste of Christmas Blend to a customer in terms of the feeling one gets cuddling up with a fuzzy blanket by a crackling fire while reading a novel. Or another barista might describe the bold and earthy taste of Sulawesi as the perfect complement to an easy going Saturday morning reading the newspaper with John Coltrane’s serenading saxophone wafting throughout the house.
It’s much more meaningful to personalize a product by highlighting not just its benefit, but the benefit of the benefit.
Leading Questions …
What is the benefit of the benefit of your best-selling product or service? Think about its most important feature and make it more personal, until you’ve reached the ultimate experience your customers derive from it.
Review your marketing materials and messages related to your specific products and/or services. Are they communicating product features, product benefits, or the entire personal experience—the benefit of the benefit?
Marketing messages surround us consumers no matter where we are and what we do. It’s like we are trapped inside a singles bar all day, every day, having to endure pickup line after pick-up line from a never-ending stream of advertisements hoping to score a one night brand-stand with us.
Starbucks marketers work under the premise that marketing has become the enemy. They believe that consumers today are savvy enough to sniff out anything that smells the least bit insincere and contrived. Marketing authenticity is the antidote to the world being perceived as a gigantic advertisement.
Starbucks marketers use a six-point unwritten code to ensure that the marketing programs they create and implement are authentic, that they’re staying on message and on brand, and that they tell the story of what makes the product they are promoting Starbucks-worthy. Ideally, every marketing program created and implemented at Starbucks adheres to the following six unwritten rules:
Be genuine and authentic
Evoke feelings, never prescribe feelings
Always say who you are, never who you are not
Stay connected to front-line employees
Deliver on all promises made
Respect people’s intelligence
1. BE GENUINE AND AUTHENTIC
Nothing is more genuine and authentic than brewed coffee. Starbucks believes its marketing messages should be as genuine and authentic as the coffee it brews.
Starbucks has spent a great amount of effort getting to know its customers and what its customers want and expect from the company. This shows in the genuineness of one of their recent co-promotions. In the spring of 2006, Starbucks teamed with the New York Times to offer a contest in which customers would purchase a copy of the Sunday paper at a Starbucks store, complete the Sunday crossword within the special Starbucks promotional insert, and send in the completed puzzle after compiling clues over a month-long period. It makes sense that Starbucks would choose to do this over, say, a puzzle contest based on Sudoku or some other super-trendy game.
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