Starbucks digital strategy director, Alexandra Wheeler, explained some interesting aspects of their "My Starbucks Idea" community in Brand Week ( Elaine Wong's Why Starbucks Is the Top Brand on Facebook Aug 12, 2009).
Using social media for cocreation of services and product innovation is "well known to those who know" but is off the radar for 99% of people who think about social media as being just a new channel for marketing or "campaigns".
The My Starbucks Idea social media initiative has clearly been rated a big success by Starbucks, see below, and what I found especially interesting the statistic on how many ideas actually make it into implementation.
- 75,000 ideas have been submitted
- 25 ideas activated in the first year
- that's 3 ideas activated from each 10,000 submitted, or 0.03%
It's a minute number of ideas getting through into action.
On the other hand, for Starbucks to have organised or contracted or worked internally to come up with 25 filtered ideas that were worth innovating in a year and had strong customer resonance would have cost them an absolute fortune - and would have been far more risky.
So yes, an outstanding result for Starbucks.
Alexandra Wheeler: My Starbucks Idea last March, an online community where our customers and partners—as we like to call our employees—can go online and submit their ideas, vote for other people’s ideas or add to ideas in the community. They can also see what Starbucks is doing with those ideas through our “Ideas in Action” blog. It’s a pretty robust community. It has over 75,000 ideas in it. In its first year, we activated 25 ideas through that program. It’s a significant way to co-create through that program, to inform business decisions that were underway or forming. [For instance,] we wouldn’t have had music in our stores if it wasn’t for our partner here, Timothy Jones, or [so many different] different creations of our beverages, to take what’s happening in store and bring that online. It’s a natural extension of the brand through that experiment, and through our success with that, we started to expand beyond that. It was important for us to go where consumers are and to provide a valuable and meaningful brand experience.
What I think is also interesting are the ramifications and lessons about setting expectations among the people submitting ideas, given that such a minute number make it through the system. What continues to motivate the 99.97% of ideas from people who are not making any progress into action?
That would be an interesting topic in itself.
