Starbucks Brand | Food and Beverage Industry | Retaillers Online

Starbucks
decaffinated
by Charlotte Jane Dyson
June 3, 2002

Starbucks has certainly caused a stir among brand practioners and coffee addicts alike. The 30-year-old brand from Seattle took a while to perk but it is now ready to serve to a worldwide audience. But does Starbucks.com contain everything the hardened addict needs to feed a habit online?

The brand is handled in a very direct manner with few

pretensions at portraying a lifestyle image. Upon opening the Starbucks homepage the viewer is treated to exactly what he might expect to find: the core product in images of coffee plantations, Starbucks mugs, and foil coffee bean bags.

The corduroy-textured gray background supports the front-page news and feature items, and a functional menu with options like a store locator, search facility and online shop.

Regular visitors are rewarded for their continued patronage. There is a sign-in area (making one feel like a proper caffeine addict) which allows frequent shoppers to speed up the coffee buying experience by storing personal details. Something like the staff remembering to put skim in your macchiato.

The pot starts to simmer when you open the online shop option and browse around the various gifts, bags of coffee and brand variants like ice cream, tea and chocolate. The feel is of a supermarket e-tail site with the shopping basket never far from view; everything is clearly priced in dollars. (At present, Starbucks has four sister sites for Austria, Japan, South Korea and Switzerland.)

The For Business section promotes a catering and office beverage service based on taking the brand into the workplace. This section covers all the bases for Starbucks, which have around 5,000 coffee bars throughout the world as well as extensive distribution of products in grocery chains.

Charlotte Jane Dyson is a marketing consultant. She lives in Yorkshire, England, and spent fourteen years in consumer marketing with Nestlé.

*Due to the constantly changing environment of websites, some reviews may no longer reflect the current website for this brand.


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