Welcome to my Blog! I've begun this as a side project to share some thoughts on the worlds science, marketing and life. As of writing this, I have just ended my sophomore year of college at Tufts University, and am well on my way to a degree in Chemistry with a minor in Entrepreneurial & Leadership Studies. Where I'll end up with those is still unclear to me, but I do know a few things to point me in at least some semblance of a career direction. For one, I know I love the world of science, specifically chemistry, as since I was introduced to the topic in 10th grade by an important mentor in my life. I know I love exploring and learning about the physical laws that dominate the world we live in, and most of all I know I love sharing these passions of mine. I've always said, "I like chemistry, but love talking about it." The Entrepreneurship and Business Planning course I've just completed confirmed my interest that I belong in and around the field of chemistry, but not in the forefront of it performing laboratory research.
This post's focus is on a novel marketing tool employed by Starbucks this past year. The Starbucks "Tweet-a-Coffee" program allowed its customers to link their Starbucks and Twitter accounts in order to gift $5 gift cards to others by including @Tweetacoffee in the tweet. Research firm Keyhole reported on the campaign: Over 27,000 people used this feature creating revenues upwards of $180,000.
This post's focus is on a novel marketing tool employed by Starbucks this past year. The Starbucks "Tweet-a-Coffee" program allowed its customers to link their Starbucks and Twitter accounts in order to gift $5 gift cards to others by including @Tweetacoffee in the tweet. Research firm Keyhole reported on the campaign: Over 27,000 people used this feature creating revenues upwards of $180,000.
Starbucks created an easier and more hip way to gift someone their product. Starbucks understands its customer and how its customer interacts with the world around them. Not only this, but by engaging an authorized account purchase simply by including the @Tweetacoffee handle, Starbucks has built upon the effective functionality of the twitter platform itself, for better or worse. Other benefits of this, as Keyhole plainly notes, is the linking between the twitter handle, credit cards, mobile devices and geographic location of where the gift card is used, a huge lump of data for customer identification and profiling.
The double-edged sword in this technique is that because Keyhole used tweets that are available to the public to analyze the campaign, the competitors can too just as easily.
Also worth noting is the concrete figures for ROI that can be developed for this tool. Rarely can a business so directly link how social media/marketing efforts are affecting sales figures, and this is just another consequence of the world becoming more digitalized and trackable.
Either way, Starbucks had an effective, although small overall in gross sales, campaign that demonstrated their knowledge of their customer. I only expect more companies to follow in this trend following Starbucks' success.