What You Order at Starbucks Could be a Customer Idea
Designing business plans and products isn’t always a job for the employees within the company. There are many companies that implement co-creation methods to gather information about what customers really want while allowing them to participate in the business. Starbucks has been using co-creation methods for a number of years and their website, mystarbucksidea.com, is a way customers can easily submit ideas. The ideas can be voted on through the website’s platform and the user community selects and comments on the most promising content.
Of course, Starbucks has the ultimate choice whether to integrate the content into a product design. This shows an open contribution activity with a firm-led selection activity. Starbucks also introduces a badge sort of reward. If you have a design that the company accepts, you receive a little innovation light bulb symbol. You also get some recognition on their site. Top commentators also receive a badge and ,in addition, there is a leader board for top innovators.
I decided to test mystarbucksidea.com for myself by submitting a product idea. My idea was to make a traditional cloth filter with the Starbucks name. There are many coffee traditionalists (not many here in America anymore) that prefer to filter their coffee with a cloth filter because of a small taste difference and because of its traditional nature. It was very simple to submit an idea and have it open to the public vote. Each vote is worth 10 “points.” The point system doesn’t necessarily mean your idea will be accepted by a certain amount of points but it does make the experience more enjoyable. Over the course of 3 days, I was awarded 10 points for the idea (one upvote) but I did not receive any comments. That is far from the top voted idea, a star for each individual coffee purchased, which is nearly at 400,000 points!
Starbucks is trying to achieve a stronger customer to company relationship. It is also trying to achieve new ideas based on public interest and gain knowledge of customer opinion. This experience makes me feel that Starbucks cares about its customer’s opinions. It also makes me feel that Starbucks is doing a great job in using customer co-creation to expand its business