Even though the luxurious Starbucks coffee is priced higher than most of its competitors, it makes sure to give consumers an experience worth the money they pay.
They start right when you enter the store by greeting you flamboyantly, calling out your name when your order is ready and wishing you a good day when you leave. They make you feel valued. They strategically place their billing counter either in the center or at the end of the store for you to experience other customers happy experiences and be influenced by them. It is also speculated that they write your name on your cup to make it more personal. However, sometimes they would intentionally spell it incorrectly and in a funny way. This usually leads to you discussing it with your friends about the funny takeaway, which leads to curiosity amongst your friends’ part to experience the same for themselves. Starbucks offers a great reward program where for every $1, you receive 3 stars and on collecting 150 stars you receive a free drink. You can also select your choice of coffee to take home and they will grind it in front of you. This reassures you about their authenticity. Starbucks doesn’t believe in a uniform look and feel to their service as they want to blend into different regional cultures so they design their outlets accordingly. By doing all of this, they can hope to build the feeling that it is a third place in your life to go work and relax at the same time. Not your office, not your home, but Starbucks. Starbucks also used a “hub” market strategy, whereby a clustered group of its coffee shops entered a new territory. Due to the opening of a nearby store, this purposeful saturation strategy unsurprisingly led to the cannibalization of roughly 30% of their own store sales. However, savings in marketing and distribution expenses as well as a raised perception of convenience more than offset this decline in income.
What other tricks do you think Starbucks plays to engage you?
