Comments on: Starbucks: tracking a wikinomics-enabled marketing success story

By: Wikinomics » Blog Archive » Dealing with backlash in the blogosphere: a personal experience

Tue, 25 Nov 2008 17:38:34 +0000

[...] to was this one- The Worst Thing About Blogs. In the post, Ryan lumped my recent story about Starbucks’ wikinomics-enabled marketing success story with other posts from the likes of Guy Kawaski, Hugh Macleod, Steve Rubel, and Michael Arrington, [...]

By: Denis Hancock

Denis Hancock — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 18:53:05 +0000

Brennan,

Thanks for the comment. However, I do think it’s a little unfair to use the stock price as the indicator of a how effective / successful a particular, one-time marketing campaign is.

Of note, Starbucks recently announced profits were down 97% YOY, they’ve over built for quite awhile, they got away from their core value proposition by automating so many parts of the production process, etc.

A single marketing campaign is not going to change all of that – and I should have noted that one-time give aways of this nature are generally poor vehicles for creating long-term customers. What it can do is increase exposure for the brand.

On this front, I do think it’s a “wow, that’s cool” moment. They used an open forum to find a what many people consider a cool idea, get a lot of free exposure through YouTube, and you can see how Facebook Lexicon might be an interesting tool for monitoring the viral properties.

By: Brennan

Brennan — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 21:47:00 +0000

I follow someone’s delicious account and this is a post they bookmarked. In their description they seemed to really disagree, so I checked out Starbucks on yahoo finance to see the impact of this campaign.

As of right now they are trading at $8.61. This is the lowest the stock price has been for the year to date. The stock did rebound considerably around the time of this campain. However, it doesn’t seem to have made a lasting impression.

If anything it seems like a flash in the pan “oh wow that’s cool” moment.

By: DH

DH — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 13:27:09 +0000

It’ll be interesting to track such movements going forward – the spike on Nov 1 seems to have been completely ignored thereafter. Does it build brand? Might also be interesting to track by industry / competition and see trends going forward.