The Secrets of Starbucks’ Success Explained By An Ex-Employee
If you think it’s the recipe, then you are wrong.
With more than 30.000 stores across the globe, Starbucks is undoubtedly the biggest coffee shop chain on Earth. This billions dollars company often makes people wonder about its success story.
As an ex-employee of Starbucks, I had the chance to get an inside look at the company, I’m lucky enough to learn things that make this gigantic company so successful.
Without out further ado, here are the secrets of the company that I learned from my work experiences.
More than just coffee
If you are thinking it’s all because of the recipe, then you are wrong. When I was working there, I always thought it would be cool to learn the recipe and maybe one day apply it to my own coffee shop.
But that was a mistake because the recipe of Starbucks was not the secret of the company, in fact when I tried to find that recipe online, there’s a lot of websites that provide it and close enough to the real recipe.
A lot of ex-employees also making their own coffee shop, we called these people ‘graduated from Starbucks’, but why people don’t just come to those new local coffee shops, with almost the same tastes and half the price?.
The revenues of the company do not only determine by the beverages, in fact they’re trying to adapt to what the customers want, this is one of the best things that a company could do, listening to their customers.
Almost every month, we always have new recipes, new beverages, new foods, or even new Starbucks’ tumblr. The company knows very well that we live in a dynamic world, which only improvement and changes can make the company survive in the years to come.
The secret of its success comes to its company branding.
They don’t sell coffee, they are selling emotions
This is what probably people or even ex-employees failed to realize, these simple sentences yet so hard to applicate is one of the biggest secrets that make Starbuck’s success.
From the moment you walked into the store till the moment you walked out, there’s a system that makes you feel welcomed, in fact, the company describes Starbucks as ‘the third place between your home and workplace’.
Everything has been designed to make you comfortable enough to spend your money at the store more easily than you might have realized. The baristas are the front liners, we are the ones who are responsible for ensuring everyone has a great time.
From the moment you are stepped into the store, you get your first greeting, “Welcome to Starbucks!” then another greeting “hello, how can I help you?”, then the Barista called your name “I have one iced venti Americano for Mr. Kenny”.
The moment you take the beverage, you get another word “Thank you!”, and when you’re finished you will have your last message from the company, “Thank you!” The moment you come into Starbucks you at least have 5 interactions with the Barista.
Let’s take a look at one of the company’s campaign, and see how they’re focusing on the emotions instead of featuring their products.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZVCLVGymmo
It feels nice right when the Barista knows your name? but in fact, we are designed, we are obligated to know and remember your name and also remember your favorite beverage, the company even mentioned it on my first day of training.
As a human being, everything that we do are based on emotions, we are also driven by emotions. Starbucks knows it very well, rather than focusing to share what makes the beverages special, they create what makes you special, the feeling that you get when you buy their products.
In his book, Howard Schultz the person who is responsible to make Starbucks known as it today wrote,
“We take something ordinary and infuse it with emotion and meaning, and then we tell its story over and over and over again, often without saying a word.”
Everything based on research
Starbucks ensuring the quality of their products, though the main point of its branding comes from the marketing itself, Howard mentioned that the beverages of it as a core of what makes Starbucks great.
When I was working there, there’s hundreds of SOP, from basic SOP as how to clean your equipment, how to sanitize it, and even how to rotate the food displays on the chiller.
When the big company doing it, then they’re doing it for certain reasons.
The store designed to be comfortable and cozy, all the furniture mostly from woods to give a warm look like brown color psychologically give this signal into our brain.
The lights are not too bright, this is known also ensuring the customers are comfortable to spend most of their time over there, and also not too dark because some customers are doing their work over there.
We can’t just connect our Spotify and play our playlist in the store, they even gave us CDs every month, they chose the music, and this also has come for certain reasons, the volume has to be at the exact number, this is to make sure that the music is not too loud to disturb people in the store.
I always believed that the job of Starbucks’ Baristas is not to guide people to spend their money at Starbucks, but rather than ensuring of people who’s over there, come back again and again, by their hospitality.
The first time, I went to its interview, I always thought that they’re most likely looking for someone with coffee knowledge, but that’s not even a selling point, in fact, not even a single question asked about coffee knowledge or experiences during the interview.
Because they know, attitude and hospitality are their main selling point. They can train you to brew a great coffee, but it takes time to build a good personality.
I hope that more local coffee shops can implement these great tips that Starbucks has, how no barrier with the customers can actually work and grow your business, how important it is to brand your company.
If the big companies are doing emotional marketing already, why the local and small business are not doing it yet? Companies like Starbucks or even Toyota stopped products featuring marketing instead they went for emotional marketing instead.
Because emotional marketing more human-friendly, you never saw Toyota’s advertisements showing how much cc in the engine, how fast it is, in fact, they’re connecting to some emotions, like showing a video of a family doing a trip.
There is no greater time to start learning about it, and we lived in the best time of the world where you can almost learn everything for free through the internet, so don’t take it for granted.
