Globally, Starbucks has a policy of writing their customers’ names on each order placed, and in some countries, they now have gone a step further to misspell one’s name as a branding strategy.
Starbucks is actually making lot’s money from just calling our names. “Oscar, Oscar, whereto art thouest, est”, they summoned me!
You walk into a Starbucks, and as you pay for you coffee they ask “what is your name sir”. Few minutes later, you hear your name being called out in everyone’s ears, “Oscar. Americano for Oscar”.
That’s corruption right there; sweet, very legal too.
Not many people realise the brand loyalty impact of this small simple gesture that Starbucks has in play. There is nothing as wonderful to a customer than the simple fact that “they called me by my name”.
You take your coffee, move up to the sugar stand, and sugar fanatics sugar themselves to an early “sleep with the fishes”, then to your seat or off to the office you go.
For me, Starbucks is hunting ground, Kruger National Park, pun intended. It is a place I go to not only smash goals, but meet new people in business. After my name has been announced, and as I take my seat, I am somewhat conscious of the fact that everyone now knows me, and walking over to sit next to a stranger now feels like walking over to seat on my bed; easy.
Just because no one is paying attention to what the other is doing, it does not mean they did not hear your name, and its echo just sounds like approval, and that approval for someone that came to “smash goals” is a literal greenlight.
Goals are smashed by Starbuckers.
In a space of one month, I met an Accountant running a start-up audit firm, a Travel Agent selling tour packages, a trigger-happy Photographer with a start-up studio, a Choreographer, a Scout for Television Shows, and more.
It is an emotional recognition that flows inside you, even for a few seconds, it creates worth. Just the fact that Starbucks called Oscar by name means much more to Oscar than the R27 he just donated to their Get-Rich-Fund.
The Taste of Profitology
Starbucks franchise is run by Taste Holdings, a listed company on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. Taste Holdings’ get-rich-fund is being supported by probably a thousand more Oscar’s a month.
In their Annual Report, Taste Holdings reported that “Sales in Starbucks increased by 46% to R108 million (2018: R75 million) as a result of 2 two additional stores being added to the network in 2019, bringing the total store count at 28 February 2019 to 12”.
All of the Starbucks are located in the upper-income brackets of Johannesburg, the areas where there is an international feel of life and commerce, hence extremely lucrative for such a brand.
Taste Holdings is so optimistic about Starbucks brand stores that they reported “the combined stores network is currently profitable at an EBITDA level. The focus is to grow store profitability through new store openings and margin improvements, to the point where profit contributions exceed the cost of the brand’s support and admin infrastructure, referred to as above store costs. We have a revised capital model which caters for various store formats and have set a target of opening 6 new stores in the next financial year”.
Such bold optimism is not just a financial intelligence, but first a realisation of their brand’s ability to sustain the current customers but grow in brand loyals that will bring more revenue in their coming stores.
Now that is a brand that understands Buyology.
Buyology – Truth and Lies About Why We Buy
In Buyology – Truth and Lies About Why We Buy, Martin Lindstrom analyses what makes people buy in a world which is cluttered with messages like advertisements, slogans, jingle, and celebrity endorsements.
Buyology unveils the results of marketing guru Martin Lindstrom’s pioneering three‐year, US$7 million-dollar study that used the latest in brain scan technology to peer into the minds of over 2,000 people from around the world. The shocking results will overturn reveal why so much of what we thought we knew about why we buy is wrong, rewriting the rules of marketing and advertising in the process.
Buyology bears witness to an historic meeting between science and marketing: a union of apparent opposites that sheds new light on why we make decisions about what we buy. Thanks to neuroimaging, we can now understand better what really drives our behaviour, our opinions, our preference for Corona over Budweiser, iPods over Zunes, or MacDonald’s over Wendy’s.
Through Project Buyology, neuromarketing has emerged as a powerful new tool in understanding consumers’ decision‐making processes. This methodology is ready to revolutionize our understanding of our own buying behaviour and send shock waves throughout the marketing and advertising industries as well as the business world.
If you get the book, you’re about to discover your own ‘buyology’.
Neuromarketing and the Business
Vera Kolyovska, Jane Maslarova, and Dimitar Maslarov, researchers from various international institutions in Europe, at a Biomedical research workshop presented a paper on Neuromarketing called “Buyulogy is a masterpiece”. These are the extracts thereof;
Neuromarketing is an important development in the field of understanding how the subconscious mind helps the consumer to make decisions. Neuromarketing involves application of cognitive neurosciences in the field of marketing and marketing research.
Ale Smidts first coined the word neuromarketing in 2002. He studied consumers’ sensorimotor, cognitive, and affective response to marketing stimuli.
Branding expert Dr. Peter Steidl says neuromarketing will change the face of marketing, and without it, campaigns will lag behind competitors that have embraced this new way of thinking about consumer behaviour and branding.
He is not talking about lab tests that deliver reliable but limited information about how consumers process marketing stimuli such as ads, logos or package designs. Rather, he is referring to the application of neuroscience concepts in a strategic context. In other words, how marketers can benefit from the latest insights into how consumers think, feel and, and most importantly, make purchase decisions.
The application of neuroscience lifts the effectiveness of marketing, brand, communications, and shopper marketing, pricing and innovation strategies – including, of course, social and other digital media strategies.
Neuromarketing Insights
Brief overviews on three important neuroscience insights, highlighting a number of important marketing implications are as follows:
Insight 1: Consumers have two parallel circuits in their mind, one for thinking and one for doing – Nobel Prize Laureate Daniel Kahneman simply called them System 1 and System 2, although marketers may want to think about these circuits as the consumer’s ‘doing’ and ‘thinking’ minds, respectively. Harvard professor Gerald Zaltman suggests that 95% of purchase decisions are made by the non-conscious ‘doing’ mind.
Insight 2: The brain is designed to avoid thinking by using shortcuts to make purchase decisions – The ‘doing’ mind influence extends even further. Having been designed to help us survive in a hostile natural environment, the ‘doing’ mind has developed energy preservation strategies. In addition, as the brain – which accounts for only some 3% of body weight – accounts for approximately 20% of all energy consumed, the ‘doing’ mind seems to have focused on finding ingenious decision shortcuts that eliminate the need for thinking.
Insight 3: the marketer’s challenge is to shape the consumer’s brand memory – a marketer needs to invest into developing a positive, emotionally strong brand memory that is linked to one or more of the consumer’s goals.
However, current practice is often not aligned with this principle. It is important to ensure at all touch points that the brand plays a central, emotionally engaging role. If that is not the case, you may get consumers involved but they will not end up buying your brand.
Applying Neuromarketing into You Brand
Here are six major areas where neuromarketing is used today: Branding, Product design and innovation, Advertising effectiveness, Shopper decision making, On-line experiences, Entertainment effectiveness.
Source: Cabanga Magazine
