Starbucks Uses Offline Media To Launch Viral Social Media Campaign
By Anna Johnson on May 25th, 2009Last week the Starbucks Coffee chain launched an interesting offline ad campaign in the U.S. In fact, it’s an offline campaign aimed at encouraging viral world of mouth online, specifically via social media.
Starbucks erected posters in six major U.S. cities and challenged people to look for the posters ‘tweet’ about them on Twitter.
The posters are text-heavy explanations of Starbucks’ merits as a coffee purveyor and company. The text talks about how Starbucks chooses only premium coffee beans, carefully roasts them, and even how the company gives its part-time workers health insurance.
Claude Hopkins would be proud. Claude Hopkins is the legendary, turn-of-the-century copywriter and advertising pioneer who not only advocated copy-driven ads, but also the idea of selling a product by educating prospects about the process involved in creating it… even if it’s the same process used to create competing products!
Evidently, Starbucks opted for the long-copy ads to not just explain its story but to convey the impression that it has a lot to say about coffee.
Commenting on Starbucks’ campaign, Richard Honack, a professor of marketing at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University is quoted in The New York Times as questioning whether such an approach will work with young people.
Honack reckons that ‘Generation Y’ – evidently the main target of the campaign – is attracted to Starbucks for the Internet, music and as being a place to hang out, and that they may not be interested in knowing about the origins of coffee.
Whether or not the campaign will work remains to be seen. But it’s not as if Starbucks is entirely preaching to the unconverted – it has 1.5 million fans on Facebook and 183,000 followers on Twitter.
Personally, I think this kind of integration of offline and online media… and the integration of advertising, PR, social media and viral marketing… has a LOT of merit. I’m looking forward to seeing more marketers engage in more initiatives along these lines.
Source: Claire Cain Miller, “New Starbucks Ads Seek to Recruit Online Fans,” May 19, 2009
