You enter a cozy and airy cafe with comfortable lightning, as you go through the door the sound of clicking pens, typing and paper cups inscribed with varied names hitting tables surround you. You can’t ignore the strong smell of freshly brewed coffee and the internal will to integrate into that environment to be as productive as those engaged anonymous people. You probably thought about a specific brand with a white siren engraved in a green circle logo, Starbucks. That is exactly what the brand is projecting with the experience they provide. Starbucks influences consumers to have a creative and pleasant image of themselves where you can get anytime of the day a special and perfectly designed drink, through their use of brand identity, advertisement and buying experience.
One branding strategy Starbucks uses is a clear brand identity through logo, color palette and mission statement that makes consumers associate their drinks with nature, calmness, exclusiveness and belonging. Their logo goes beyond just a woman with two mermaid tails. The brand’s intention is that consumers make a connection between a mythical figure that is known to seduce sailors with the temptation that coffee has into the ones who love its taste. The green color communicates a healthy, peaceful, renewed and balanced image of the company. This is extended to the pure-white paper cup covered with a burlap brown coffee sleeve that suggests an eco-friendly approach and transmits a message of premium and irreplaceable product. As stated in their website, Starbucks has a clear mission statement of inspiring and nurturing the human spirit – “one person, one cup and one neighbourhood at a time.” This makes consumers feel included and part of a welcoming community, where they are treated with “transparency, dignity and respect.” And, where the employees are open to do whatever is in their power to deliver the “best in all [they] do.” This illustrates to the customers that they will always encounter the same delightful experience wherever they go.
Another branding strategy Starbucks uses is advertisements, which conveys a consistent message of exclusivity and greenery imagery. Each ad is perfectly designed for and matched to its customers. Starbucks uses a huge variation of marketing media to make their brand noticeable. All the content they produce follows the same pattern with visual and language standards that consumers expect from the brand. Still, if you set them side by side with other known companies, Starbucks spends much less on their marketing and can still make a great strike on their public. Along with their social media, the brand produces a number of interactive posts and keeps a classy and charming instagram feed. The varied spectrum of posts embraces festive and cultural celebrations, challenges, and reviews, with catchy and harmonious pictures of different drinks, inspirational quotes written in their cups and memes. Starbucks exploits minorities’s events as a strategy to show their unprejudiced and comprehensive position. One example is the #ExtraShotOfPride campaign that was launched in June 2019, during Pride Month. Its goal was to give emphasis to the LGBTQIA+ community projecting a friendly workplace and humanize the multi-billion dollar company. The hashtag was a success with nearly 100,000 likes and hundreds of comments per post and deepened the relationship between Starbucks and its consumers (@Starbucks). The company has in mind that its spectators are technologically advanced, which leads Starbucks to have really powerful digital marketing plans, which makes them tend to use two-way communication platforms, just like Instagram in which they have 17,9 millions of followers and on Facebook 362,000. In addition, the brand offered a Pride Month related gift card throughout the month of June, in which there were four different styles that included phrases like “Love for all,” “Pride,” “Extra shot of pride,” and “All Together Now” with colourful stripes, confetti illusions and sparkles.
Starbucks also uses buying experience to evoke a desire to be in a tranquil and productive atmosphere that resembles a movie-like environment. They provide their customer base a whole experience when they come to their store (“Starbucks Marketing Strategy: Create a Remarkable Brand”). We all admit that buying a fine cup of coffee and being triggered to settle down in a comfortable chair with your laptop and check out your to-do list is heart-warming. This feeling expands to everything they create: from their digital content, to their advertising and from the atmosphere in their stores everything looks and feels like Starbucks. The consequence? Your interaction with the brand will always be the same, regardless if it’s watching one of their ads, or waiting to get your order. You know that the coffee will always taste the same, anonymous people will act productive, the indescribable smell will not change and the sounds of clicking pens, typing and paper cups hitting tables when you enter any Starbucks will be heard. This indicates how Starbucks’s consistent marketing strategy of an intimate atmosphere and incomparable service makes it remarkable and differentiated from any other coffee shops. They recently removed the name Starbucks from their logo and stopped producing that many commercials. Why? The short answer is: they simply don’t have to. Starbucks branding strategies turned simple coffee shops into a comfortable place to interact with friends and family, relax, do work and take time for yourself. With the help of their advertising, they awake a feeling of an affectionate brand with a welcoming community of consumers. Their straightforward logo suggests to customers that they will have the same craving for coffee as lost sailors have with charming sirens. And their stores hold the idea that they are an eco-friendly company where you will always find the same cozy experience no matter where you go. Even though Starbucks is a high priced company that uses stale coffee beans, people still prefer to buy there rather than from local coffee shops that have much better drinks with affordable prices. This happens because Starbucks has 24,000 retail stores in 70 countries. We can deduce that the preference for Starbucks comes from the capitalist American monopoly that puts local business out of the market. This makes most streets of the United States of America filled with roughly the same 5-10 mega-corporations. And it doesn’t stop there: Starbucks uses an unnecessary amount of sugar and milk, which has been changing people’s opinion on coffee taste (“Why Starbucks Is Bad – the 3 Reasons You Need to Stop Going”). Next time you reach for a Starbucks coffee cup, have in mind how they market more than just their drinks in pursuit of their profit.
Works Cited
“Culture and Values: Starbucks Coffee Company.” Starbucks, www.starbucks.com/careers/working-at-starbucks/culture-and-values. Accessed 11 November 2022.
“Starbucks Marketing Strategy: Create a Remarkable Brand.” CoSchedule Blog, 6 July 2022, coschedule.com/blog/starbucks-marketing-strategy. Accessed 15 November 2022.
@Starbucks. Instagram, www.instagram.com/starbucks/. Accessed 13 November 2022.
“Why Starbucks Is Bad – the 3 Reasons You Need to Stop Going.” MNC, 19 Nov. 2018, making-nice-coffee.com/why-starbucks-is-bad. Accessed 17 November 2022.
