Tell Your Team About Your Marketing!
January 10, 2009 • No comments
I’m an admitted caffeine addict. When Starbucks sends me an email about the latest additions to their beverage lineup, I pay attention. Those little email offers are like gold to me - giving me a new opportunity to try something different, and an excuse to get my husband out on a coffee date.
This week I received this offer: try one of their brand spankin’ new tea lattes for only $2.
Since our barrista friend Paul had already told us that these were coming down the pike and promised creamy, yummy goodness, we headed right out to take advantage of the offer. Only hitch - you had to pay with a registered Starbucks cash card. Not a problem for us, since we have about 5 floating between the two of us.
Unfortunately, when we arrived anticipating the delightful concoctions, none of the staff members on duty had heard anything about the promotion! While they remained Starbucks-style friendly, I’m sure that they thought we were trying to pull a fast free-coffee / tea scam on them somehow. I hadn’t brought a print out of the email offer, so could only try to describe the email, the offer, our excitement, etc. using hand-gestures as necessary for embellishment. They did (somewhat grudgingly) give us the drinks for $2.10 each since their till wasn’t programmed for the $2 offer, and we felt like we had done something a little wrong. I’m guessing that this is NOT what the marketing team responsible had desired as the end result of their campaign. We did really enjoy our drinks though - a London Fog and a Vanilla Rooibos Latte - and had a nice chat with one of the girls a little later, hopefully leaving her no doubt about our deal worthiness.
Pointing out the obvious - marketing teams need to clearly communicate campaigns and goals in-house. When focusing on how to communicate with our customers is our main focus, it is sadly too easy to forget that if we fail to communicate with our own team, our marketing all falls apart. I know we’ve all seen it happen over and over, in all kinds of companies, but this shouldn’t happen.
Fortunately for Starbucks, they’ve worked hard at the fine art of customer service, so we - the loyal customer - didn’t leave empty handed. All in all, the promotion basically worked because we tried the beverages. Heck, we’re even paying for them, if at a reduced cost. This is great marketing. A free email sent out to the customer, driving us into the store to purchase something we wouldn’t have otherwise, hopefully turning us into product evangelists and repeat customers.
Yes, we’ve talked about the tea lattes with a few people now, and yes we did enjoy them (although the teabag seemed enormous for the tall cup - making me feel like I didn’t actually get a whole beverage, but 2/3 beverage & 1/3 tea bag). So generally, this worked. However, if we hadn’t been more persistent, we may have walked away. We would have had a negative experience, and while we would have returned (we’re both addicts) we may not have ever tried out the new product.
Thank you, Starbucks. With this multi-sensory yummy experience under my belt, I’m going to file this one in the marketing memory bank so that I can learn from your mistake. I should have learned from my own errors, but this one brought it home.
Share this!
rss feed