Starbucks Social Media and Business Leadership Renewal During Challenging Times

• In Event: The Use of Digital Communications and Old Fashioned Storytelling

Short Description

Discover how Starbucks used social media best practices to make their customer experience more relevant and valuable during turbulent economic times. CEO Howard Schultz and his team took bold steps with social media and cues from Dell Computer. These effective business leadership lessons apply to businesses small and large.

Detailed Abstract

The widespread use of social media has accelerated the importance of customer experience (CX) as people share experiences of companies with many others easily, quickly and efficiently. Yet, worldwide only a small number of companies develop powerful social media strategies that are effective at building meaningful customer experiences increasing advocacy rates and the bottom line. Starbucks provided an extraordinary customer experience, based on insights gained with the use of social media best practices while avoiding typical social media mistakes.
Organizations that understand how to best leverage social media as part of a strategic customer experience (CX) initiative can increase their brands relevance and value.
The businesses that remain passive in social media effectiveness also dubbed Mere Virtual Presence, (MVP) with a void in CX to complement social media are typically marginalized lacking business leadership to retain or increase customer loyalty and advocacy (Naylor, Lamberton, & West, 2012). Others like Veríssimo and Menezes (2015) agree that especially in the hospitality industry that the use of customer experience strategies are among the most important marketing differentiating devices other than just price and quality.
Starbucks stood on the verge of a crisis in September 2008 needing to revive its customer experience and profit margins during an historic economic downturn impacting their relevance and value.

Starbucks’ stock reached an all-time low of $7.83 a share in November 2008, a continuation of a steep value slide from $38.41on October 6, 2006. Of its 9,000 stores worldwide, the company committed to closing approximately 600 underperforming company-operated stores in the U.S. and 61 stores in Australia (Bean & Van Tyne, 2012, p. 31).

Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz and his business leadership team created a social media strategy, to turnaround the company successfully. The understanding of effective social media best practices have practical insights for all companies small and large (Schultz, 2011).
Social Media Leadership Insights will include
• Why customer experience and social media now?
o What is the intersection of customer experience and social media?
• Change: From Buyer Beware to Supplier Beware
• Computers to coffee: An exchange of best practices between two Founding CEOs
• How Starbucks first used social media to reinvent customer experience to help the turnaround
• At-a-glance:
o Social media personas
o Emotion and social media
o The best “Experience Maker” companies and social media
• Innovation with social media
• A sampling of questions to ask about social media platforms for best practice decision making in challenging times.
• Success by substituting the most common mistakes with social media leadership best practices.
• Put in place of The most common social media mistakes to avoid
• Defining an effective social media strategy
• What should an effective social media strategy begin with?
• Your customer experience continuum and social media strategy

Join us for this engaging and practical look at social media leadership and best practices that effectively build meaningful customer experiences and contribute to the bottom line. This presentation will reveal not only how Starbucks applied the best practices of social media, but how these best practices can be incorporated in a variety of business entities from industry to the academy (Bean, 2015).

Participants

• Erik Bean, University of Phoenix

• Jeofrey Bean, University of California at San Diego