Starbucks: Media Relations

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Starbucks: Media Relations

Starbucks is an interesting company when it comes to media relations. Traditionally, Starbucks has not sought out a vigorous advertising campaign like most companies. Traditionally, and somewhat today, Starbucks has relied on word of mouth, the brands eye-catching uniqueness and store locations as its main form of advertising. This is quite the opposite from what Paul A. Argenti and Courtney M. Barnes, authors of the book, Digital Strategies, consider traditional. According to these authors traditional media relations techniques would use newspapers, magazines, radio and television to further brand reputation. Starbucks’ first TV commercial aired in 2007 in the US, 36 years after the company first opened.

Although Starbucks has taken a unique path in traditional media relations, they have adopted some new techniques to stay current and to further increase their brand reputation. Starbucks uses:

·      Website- Starbucks has an easy to use interactive website that has a lot of information about company history, products, events and investor relations

·      Newsroom- The company website has an interactive newsroom where they post electronic press releases, current events, video news releases and links to social media. Customers can also sign up to receive Starbucks news via email.

·      Social Media- Starbucks makes good use of social media. It has a Facebook page, which has over 20 million likes and a twitter with over 2 million followers. It also has a YouTube page with over 15,000 subscribers. They use these sites to post information on new drinks, products and to stay in touch mostly with the younger demographic.

·      Online Community- The company has also made use of the web by creating a ‘My Starbucks Idea,” page in their website. Here, Starbucks fans can sign up to share different ideas about products, new drinks, social media etc…

Starbucks has been able to incorporate branding details into their media relations strategies by:

·      Targeting mainstream media outlets, financial magazines and environmental publications. It is able to achieve this by creating story angles about their social responsibility, about Starbucks investments and their responsible business practices.

·      Creating positive media messages such as “Starbucks is a socially responsible company that encourages avid community involvement by bringing people together and inspiring change in people’s lives,” and “Starbucks practices environmental stewardship with energy and water conservation, as well as recycling.”

·      Using carefully selected spokes people, such as their CEO, current investors and Starbucks financial staff.

Targeting mainstream media and creating positive media messages is a good way to create “positive identification” as Argenti & Barnes would say. They say that it is important to identify media outlets that can positively influence your organization and incorporate them into your media strategy. Starbucks has identified influential spokespeople that they can use to convey their positive messages in mainstream media outlets to further increase brand reputation.

Starbucks’ media strategies are consistent with their overall company personality. For E.G. Starbucks is big on environmental stewardship and corporate social responsibility, so they deliberately target environmental & agricultural publications by creating story angles and media messages that these magazines would love to pick up. For e.g. a story line or message that an environmental publication would like to pick up could be, “Starbucks sponsors various philanthropies throughout the year through in-store promotions and Starbucks maintains long-term, ethical relationships with its suppliers, which leads to more stable production costs and profits.”

If I could point out something that Starbucks could improve in their media strategies it would be more ad campaigns. Maybe they could branch out and create commercials on television and radio. With that being said, we still can’t forget that they are one of the most successful coffee companies in the world, so maybe no change is needed for the companies media relations strategies.

Works Cited

Argenti, Argenti A. and Courtney M. Barnes. Digital startegies for Corporate communications. McGraw Hill, 2009.