Many visitors to the Starbucks coffee houses know that its employees sometimes ask visitors and write them on coffee glasses. Sometimes they make funny mistakes in names. There is a rumor that this is done intentionally: supposedly in this way the company increases the number of mentions of the brand in social networks. We figure out if this is really.
This hearing has been walking on the Internet for many years. The most popular publications that spread it, Made In English. However, in Russian it can be found quite often. This is evidenced by popular media publications (1, 2, 3) and on social networks: in Instagram, Facebook, Telegram, Tiktok). But is he true?
They explain the manipulation as follows: hundreds of people publish photos of their coffee cups with warped names daily in order to laugh friends and subscribers, and the Starbucks marketers supposedly only need to, they have grinding brand and sale.
Where did this idea come from?
Some publications refer to interview 2014, in which Starbucks unnamed Barista really claims (referring to their manager, also not named by name) that Starbucks employees use errors in names as a marketing tool. However, it does not say how much this practice is supported by the company itself.
Other authors of publications (for example, Lenta.ru) refer to the experiment, which was allegedly conducted in 2016 by participants in the creative project of Super Deluxe from Los Angeles, which has now ceased to exist. The video about this experiment and its results was published on YouTube and later deleted, but a description of its content was preserved: a woman named Molly went into five different Starbucks coffee houses and bought coffee in each, receiving five different options for writing her name (including Vanilli and even Mommy). Based on this, the authors of Super Deluxe (and after them the media and bloggers in different countries) suggested that the company could make mistakes in the names intentionally.
But we must understand that, firstly, Super Deluxe was known as a satirical and parody project, and the video could well be staged, and secondly, even if you calculate the experiment reliable, then in this case it would not prove that the distortion was intentional and even more so since it was the result of the company's marketing strategy.
What does Starbucks network itself say?
On the Internet in several places there is a mention of one comment made by the company representative. For example, it is given in guest column Marketologist and publicist Chris Mother on the website of Inc.com on December 13, 2016. The uterus claims that he turned to Starbucks for clarification and received an answer: “We never asked and did not order our partners for one reason or another to distort the names of our visitors.”
December 14, 2016 the same comment was quoted in article On the website Glamor.com (without link to the mother).
The same statement word for word is found in article On the website Thrillist, published in December 29, 2016 (without reference to the mother or Glamor). However, it has a more deployed comment, and other words of the company representative are also given here: “Writing names on glasses is a funny tradition that appeared as a result of communication between workers and customers. Our [barista] is trying to do everything possible to write the names of customers correctly, but sometimes it can be difficult.”
It seems that the press release was sent in December 2016 at once to several publications that requested a comment by Starbucks (most likely, after the video of Super Deluxe).
This comment Starbucks has surfaced later. For example, c article 2023 on the site Mashed.com.
What do the company's employees say?
Some Internet users who are employees (or former employees) Starbucks also They saythat they have never received instructions to distort the names. And among the causes of errors, they call more ordinary:
- In the coffee houses it is noisy and the names are not always good heard
- Many names have several spelling options
- Sometimes the error can be made due to haste
- Some visitors have an incomprehensible emphasis
- as well as Starbucks workers do not always speak the language of the country where they work
It should also be borne in mind that Starbucks is one of the world's largest employers. Hundreds of thousands of people around the world work in the coffee houses of this brand. And the account of former employees is completely in millions (given the characteristic personnel of personnel and many years of the company's history). And this means that if such an instruction has ever existed, then sooner or later it would flow into the network, and many former employees of these coffee houses would confirm its existence. But we do not find anything like it on the network.
Thus, despite the fact that the phenomenon exists and even probably adds popularity to the brand, the assertion that all this is a cunning conscious marketing strategy of Starbucks, most likely false.
Photo on the cover: unsplash.com
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