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Marketing Secrets of Starbucks

Published: 2026-04-26 Author: World Gafei

Last Updated: 2026/04/26, Starbucks' financial report has also mentioned many times that its goal in China is to grow into the largest overseas market outside the United States.

Starbucks' earnings report has also repeatedly mentioned that its goal in China is to grow into the largest overseas market outside the United States. Not doing hard advertising on TV and mobile media does not mean that the Chinese market is not important. In China, Starbucks does not advertise, but skillfully advertises. It makes good use of the characteristics and partners of the Chinese market to spread.

Starbucks

Starbucks' philosophy is balance, control, marketing, sobriety and unsentimentality.

Balance means that Starbucks does not do very well or badly in all aspects, but it balances the beverage quality, customer experience, store decoration, partner management and other aspects properly.

Control and marketing means that Starbucks is essentially a marketing company, marketing targets including partners and customers, it has established a relatively closed coffee dynasty.

Just the right multi-dimensional balance

Starbucks balanced the beverage quality, customer experience, store environment and partner management perfectly, with no obvious deficiency and no obvious waste of resources. Starbucks coffee is certainly not of the highest quality in the industry, but it creates a high-end impression.

First of all, coffee needs to be mass-produced. Starbucks has more than 22000 stores around the world, and make sure that the coffee customers drink at any one of these stores has little difference in taste. Coffee has become an industrial product at Starbucks.

Secondly, the pursuit of passenger flow and efficiency is bound to sacrifice quality. The automatic coffee machine can produce a cup of coffee as soon as more than ten seconds, which greatly reduces the queuing time and can retain the guests entering the store as much as possible.

Starbucks understands that most of the consumers he faces don't know anything about coffee, so his goal is to get consumers to recognize that this is coffee and give the impression that "I've had high-quality coffee."

Then there is the customer experience and the store environment. A large part of Starbucks' success lies in providing a convenient and clean place for people to sit down, chat and work without putting too much psychological pressure on customers. Starbucks is like the public seats on campus, in the library and next to the park. These public seats are clean and tidy, and there happens to be a vendor selling sugar water nearby. In fact, people do not know that these seats are placed by vendors.

Most Starbucks stores have more than one entrance, and different entrances are opened in different directions of the store, even without coffee, pedestrians can use Starbucks as a corridor of ordinary shopping malls.

Starbucks' service is semi-self-service, most of which are terminated at the bar and need to line up to serve drinks, which saves manpower and frees customers from potential pressure.

"Control and Marketing" for everyone

Starbucks is essentially a marketing company, marketing partners and customers, it has established a relatively closed coffee kingdom, while emphasizing the control of all controllable factors. At home, low salary, but can keep partners; external, high price, but can attract customers.

Let's start with partners. The idea is to make partners feel proud of, respected, sense of security, a sense of belonging, concerned and pursuing.

Of course, in terms of advertising, Starbucks also uses its partners to promote itself. Starbucks likes to recruit campus part-time partners (usually freshmen and sophomores, part-time longer). Each partner has 10 free coffee coupons per month after working for a certain period of time.

A large number of free coupons actually go to students who have not yet formed coffee drinking habits or are developing coffee drinking habits. They may have been kept out because of a drink worth more than 30 yuan, but free coupons allow them to drink different flavors without pressure. Within a few years of graduation, a considerable number of these students will become white-collar workers. At this point, Starbucks' advertising expenses and employee benefits are smoothly merged into one. The cost is our own material, and you don't have to think about who to endorse and where to advertise, and share the money to spend on the knife.

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