Wednesday, March 12, 2014

Mid-Term Monitoring Project – Part One: Starbucks

Several days ago, when I was on the New York metro with some friends, one of them suddenly said, "Oh, I want a cup of Starbucks." I was surprised and I asked her why she said so, then she point at a men nearby, told me that it was because she saw him drinking Starbucks. I asked her, "Do you like Starbucks?" She said no, but she want to drink some at that moment. 

This made me think a lot. Starbucks is everywhere.
The coffee tycoon is too famous and has been talked too much that many people have been tired of hearing about it. There are numerous Starbucks' fans all over the world, though there are many people dislike it. However, we have to admit that one of the most successful things for a brand is: no matter you like it or not, you know about it, you hear about it, you see it everywhere, and you even buy its products. Starbucks is such a brand that gains so many people's love and hate. It seems that it even doesn't need to make too much effort to get attention, but the groundswell follows once there is any news relates to it. In fact, Starbucks knows very well how to play the game, and it enjoys the groundswell.


Starbucks' History

Founded in 1971, Starbucks is now 43 years old. The first shop that opened in Seattle, Washington, was a coffee bean roaster and retailer. It was originally owned by three partners: English teacher JerryBaldwin, history teacher Zec Siegl, and writer Gordon Bowker. In 1982, Howard Schultz joined the company and became the Chief Operating Officer (COO). During the 1980's, the whole coffee market in the US was falling. Howard Schultz persuaded the owners to sell traditional espresso beverages in addition to the original products. This strategy was successful and five more Starbucks opened in Seattle. In 1987, the three owners sold the Starbucks chain to Howard SchultzStarbucks was quickly expanded under Howard Schultz's management. 



Old photo of the building of the Original Starbucks Store at Pike Place

Old photo of early Starbucks 

Nowadays, Starbucks is the largest coffeehouse company in the world, with its tentacles stretching to 20,891 locations in 62 countries. The following picture shows a brief history of Starbucks.
Starbucks map

a brief history of Starbucks

Starbucks and Social Media

Talking about Starbucks, the effort it makes on social media impresses me. In the past month, I use SocialbakersSocial MentionAddictomaticIcerocket and Google Trends to analyze Starbucks's performance in social networks,Let's see how remarkable it performs on different social media platforms. 

restaurant social media TOP 10

According to this chart, we can see Starbucks stands out among famous restaurant brands. It occupies the first and second places in six mainstream social medias. Noticeably, on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, PinterestStarbucks runs much faster than McDonald's, Subway and other fast food giants. 


Facebook

Having over 36 millions likes on Facebook, every post of Starbucks gains hundreds of thousands of comments and likes. In its posts, Starbucks always tends to be interactive and amiable. It is good at using words, like "so excited," "smile," that easily brings friendly feelings to readers. Besides that, every post comes with a photo or a video, and it keeps the style consistently, which makes you feel familiar with. 

Socialbakers statistic report

According to SocialbakersStarbucks' Facebook has gained 152,727 new fans in the past month, increasing approximately 0.42%. There were about 3,000 posts talking about this brand, and more than 1 million interactions happened in the past month. These numbers are impressive enough to prove that Starbucks never stops putting time and energy in maintaining its relationship with the groundswell.

Twitter


It is very strange that there is no result for Twitter on Addictomatic. However, this doesn't mean that Starbucks did nothing on Twitter.  Actually, Starbucks twits almost everyday, and it has active interaction with its five millions of followers. 


YouTube

YouTube is another important social platform for Starbucks"Dumb Starbucks," which was not an official store, but a parody store founded by a man who wants to catch public's eyeballs, quickly went viral on YouTube, receiving over 3 millions views from audiences.

Videos relates to Starbucks on YouTube is countless. Indeed, Starbucks encourages people to make all kinds of videos about it. Responding to the Dumb Starbucks, some videos came out telling some tips to people who want to open their own coffee shops. Obviously, Starbucks enjoys seeing this kind of interaction happens, which help it gains more than 12 millions results on YouTubeBeing the hot topic  is always better than no one talks about it. 



Starbucks' data analysis

Social Mention

  

The above are four groups of statistics from Social Mention. I collected several groups of data in the past weeks. Some groups of them were got in the morning, and the others were got in the evening. I notice that the data I collected in the evening were weaker than what I collected in the morning. Thus, here is my assumption: people tend to talk more about Starbucks in the morning rather than in the evening; because having a cup of coffee before going to work or to school is a good idea, and people would like to share their thoughts after having Starbucks. Nevertheless, evening data shows the opposite situation. Few people choose to drink coffee before going to bed; that's why the numbers were weaker in the morning than in the evening. However, my assumption has not yet been proved because datas were not collected consistently. I would like to follow the data in the next weeks.

Icerocket



Reports from Icerocket show the trend of daily citation of Starbucks. We can see that the line doesn't fluctuate to much, with its peak on February 11, which might be because Dumb Starbucks' came out that day. The high percentage indicates that Starbucks is always a hot issue in the groundswell.





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