And, despite the fact that many marketers are now figuring out ways to “buy” this kind of buzz from consumers, the most effective word-of-mouth advertising still can’t be bought. Even if you’re telling your story, and not making it up, your advertising efforts will increasingly meet skepticism in a marketplace saturated with competing and boisterous advertising messages. The bottom line is this: You still have to be remarkable if you want to get remarked about.
Seth Godin, in his book Purple Cow, illustrates the new, post-“TV-industrial-complex” marketing model by contrasting the examples of the success of Volkswagen’s original Beetle and its redesigned new Beetle. The original Beetle languished in the United States for years before Volkswagen (VW) hooked up with the forward-thinking advertising agency Doyle Dane Bernbach in 1959, and launched one of the most significant and effective print and TV campaigns of the 20th century. Forty years later, when VW redesigned their by-then retired Beetle model, it didn’t rely on advertising to convince people to buy the car. It put its attention into the sleek, rounded design of the exterior and the car’s sporty handling. Genuine enthusiasm from industry press and customers who spread the word created credible buzz and, combined with the car’s distinctive, irresistible look, made it the one car everyone wanted. “Every time the very round Beetle drove down a street filled with boxy SUVs,” Godin writes, “it was marketing itself.”
Marketers face a brave new world of satisfying consumer wants, not needs. And, increasingly, advertising has less of an impact on people’s consciousness than it used to. The louder and more frequent the messages become, the more people tune them out.
The Starbucks marketing department practices an agnostic attitude about advertising more than an atheistic attitude. That is, it’s not impossible that Starbucks would never, under any circumstances, believe in advertising. It’s just that the company has its doubts, and it is not willing to commit to having faith in advertising to make sales happen.
Again, it’s not that Starbucks doesn’t believe in any advertising. It’s just that the company knows there are much more effective ways to drive sales and build its brand.
Marketing at Starbucks is more a case of doing and being rather than saying. Starbucks would rather do what they do and be who they are and not succumb to using traditional advertising to say what they do and say who they are. Instead, Starbucks would rather spend marketing dollars to make the customer experience better and not to make the advertising better.
Starbucks spends its marketing dollars to make the customer experience better by
adding more unique beverages to its menu;
adding wireless internet (wi-fi) and music listening/CD-burning kiosks to the coffee experience;
adding more comfy couches and more reading tables in its stores; and
adding more partners on staff to increase speed of service to customers.
All of the business activities mentioned above are considered marketing activities to Starbucks because a customer’s experience is “the marketing” for Starbucks.
Customers have told Starbucks its image of authenticity and integrity has been enhanced by its limited use of traditional advertising. Many Starbucks customers hold the belief that traditional advertising shouldn’t be trusted, that it is an unnecessary marketing activity for Starbucks to engage in.
For Starbucks, action, not advertising, is the most effective way to drive sales and build a brand.
Leading Questions …
What goals are your advertising campaigns trying to meet? Are you counting on advertising to build your brand in ways that might be better accomplished through improving your products and/or services and enhancing customer experiences?
If you freed up advertising dollars to be spent elsewhere within your marketing budget, how best would you allocate the money to focus more on being and doing rather than saying?
Admittedly, Starbucks is still learning this lesson of doing fewer things to realize bigger, better results. For years the internal mantra has been “Unplug Before Your Plug.” This means: Before Starbucks was to launch a new beverage or initiate a new marketing program, a beverage would have to be removed from the menu or a marketing program would have to fully run its course.
This unplugging thing at Starbucks hasn’t gone as planned.
Ten years ago, the menu at Starbucks was much simpler, but customers could still customize their coffee drink in one of 10,000 ways. Today, the beverage menu has exploded, and now there more than 55,000 different ways a customer can personalize their Starbucks beverage. Plus the marketing team is stretched thin managing wideranging partnerships with the likes of Yahoo!, Lions Gate Films, Jim Beam, and so on.
Yet there are still so many more worthwhile initiatives Starbucks could participate in—but the company says no to 99.5 percent of all the programs proposed to them.
Starbucks is full of passionate overachievers eager to take on every worthwhile project. And with a never-ending stream of seemingly worthwhile projects always on the to-do list of Starbucks marketers, many have to remind themselves that fewer, bigger, better is still best.
The Starbucks marketing culture teaches that focusing on fewer marketing programs will result in building bigger programs, and bigger programs will ultimately drive better results.
As Starbucks moves forward, it remains to be seen how well it can manage this philosophy. Their “Ultimate Coffeehouse Crossword Challenge” contest promotion with the New York Times adhered to the marketing guidelines in every way and garnered the desired results. Yet Starbucks’ promotion of the Lions Gate film Akeelah and the Bee may have compromised some of the company’s hard-earned integrity. As movie tie-ins go, it was certainly a far cry from the typical fast-food chain-Hollywood blockbuster cross-promotion. An independent, feel-good movie about an 11-year-old African-American girl competing in the National Spelling Bee, Akeelah probably appealed to the archetypal Starbucks customer. And Starbucks’ promotion of the film cost the company next to nothing, yet garnered a share of box office sales (albeit small as it was), merchandising revenue, television rights, soundtrack sales, and DVD sales—millions of dollars in revenues that went directly to the bottom line. In other words, the financial risk was nonexistent, while the financial upside was tremendous.
But what of the downside in terms of violating the trust of Starbucks customers and employees? Because the promotion had little to do with the customer experience, people may have felt as though they were being used as pawns in the marketing game.
I think Starbucks would argue that there is a benefit to its customers, in that it clues them into a worthwhile, thought-provoking, and inspirational film—a parallel to what it’s doing with music. But it does seem perilously close to violating its own rules of marketing promotion, and it is one more thing added to the mix. It’s doing more, not fewer, bigger, or better. Will it have been worth it in the long-run? Ultimately, it may or may not be a trade-off Starbucks is willing to make again in the future.
The innate culture at Starbucks understands that you become more effective by being more selective. You cannot expect to succeed when you attempt to implement multiple marketing programs at the same time.
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