Starbucks ad campaign uses fans to tackle McCafé

“It’s the difference between launching with many millions of dollars versus millions of fans.”

Those are the words of Chris Bruzzo, Starbucks VP of Brand, Content & Online, to describe the chain’s new marketing strategy. It’s an integrated campaign which nicely reflects our very own ‘integration triangle’. It will use traditional advertising to encourage online engagement and fuel real world competitions for real world prizes.

McCafé – a $100m launch campaign

In the corner of Starbucks’ eye, it can see McDonalds has launched a new range of coffee products and reportedly backing it up with $100m worth of advertising on television, print, radio, and billboard ads. While Starbucks has little trouble differentiating its products from McCafé on grounds (no pun intended) of quality, McDonalds’ aggressive advertising means the coffee giants needs to be wary.

McCafé was launched in Australia in 1993, reaching Chicago, Illinois, eight years later. McDonalds expects to have “the majority of its 14,000 stores converted by mid-2009″ (Wikipedia).

McDonalds targeted Starbucks last year with its Unsnobbycoffee website, which argued that McCafé makes it simple to order the coffee you want without confusing names, sizes and general coffee snobbery. I’m not sure one could describe Starbucks as “snobby”, but still…

Fans v dollars

While McDonalds tools up with dollar bills, Starbucks is set to counter with a more integrated approach. It has 1.5 million Facebook fans and over 180,000 Twitter followers, and BBDO North America, the agency behind the approach, is aiming to harness and augment these in order to deliver a successful campaign.

The campaign will be driven by traditional print advertising (NYTimes.com):

“Starbucks’s text-heavy ads have bold headlines written on a background that looks like a burlap coffee sack, meant to evoke roasted coffee.”

To tie this into its social media presence, the ads in six major US cities will become the centre of attention in a series of online contests. Twitter users will be encouraged to spot the billboards and post a picture to Twitter.

Pros and cons

As Meghan Keane points out in the Econsultancy post which I’ll link to here for the third time, the issue with marketing through social media fans is that their fans and followers probably don’t really care about their coffee habits. It hardly equates to spam, but it’s possible that low-level alienation occurs.

Still, the campaign sounds nicely integrated. The print ads are suitably mainstream to stand alone as an ad campaign, but the social media schemes tie in rather well.

And bringing real world competition online (the billboard hunt) completes the Starbucks campaign’s integration. It’ll be interesting to see if the hordes of online Starbucks fans can counter McCafé’s huge budget. The Starbucks campaign is, in its own right, the company’s biggest marketing activity to date. The results will make interesting reading.