What do Starbucks and movies have in common? No, its not that a coffee will cost you four bucks in either place… Starbucks, who currently sells CDs in its stores, is now promoting movies. In A Starbucks Jolt to the Big Screen, Newsweek reports that the ubiquitous coffee vendor has launched its first movie promotion by advertising the soon-to-be released spelling bee movie Akeelah in its stores.
It’s a new direction for the coffee chain, but entirely in keeping with its success in becoming a major player in the struggling music business by hawking CDs in its 8,300 North American stores. “Film is the next logical step for us,” said Kenneth Lombard, present of Starbucks Entertainment.
Fast food, beverages, and movies have had a long relationship - McDonalds and Burger King have done merchandising tie-ins for years with blockbuster movies aimed at family audiences. Still, the Starbucks promotion thinks outside the Happy Meal, by putting unusual words (to tie in with the spelling theme of the movie) on cup sleeves and stacking travel Scrabble games in the stores.
This first venture sounds like an ideal test from an market perception standpoint. The movie sounds a bit more intellectual than, say, Mission Impossible III, and the promotions are smart enough to avoid looking so crass or commercial that they would tarnish the carefully cultivated Starbucks image. The challenge for Starbucks, if it wants to be a player in movie promotion, is to identify appropriate titles that both fit their image needs and also have the budget to afford a major promotional effort. Or, with Starbucks massive market penetration, I suppose it’s remotely possible that the chain could even approach promoting a smaller movie on some kind of equity or earnout basis. Careful product selection would be critical in this case - Starbucks would hardly want to promote a film that ends up being panned by the critics and ignored by movie-goers. The best choice would be a film that could drive its own sales from positive buzz - the Starbucks promotion could drive that critical group of early influencers into the theaters, and then, in an ideal world, positive word of mouth would take over. This kind of promotion wouldn’t produce the opening weekend grosses of a $40 million prime-time TV buildup with 30 second spots crammed with explosions and car chases, but could be particularly effective for modest scale but excellent films.
It’s interesting that Starbucks, with its music and movie promotion efforts, seems to be aiming at a lifestyle marketing approach. One wonders how seriously they have looked at exploiting the community concept and social networking. While individual shops no doubt develop microcommunities, e.g., the mid-morning group of regulars in the far corner, there’s potentially a much larger community consisting of millions of computer-savvy, fully wired (in more ways than one!) Starbucks customers who identify with the lifestyle image the coffee firm is seeking to create. If Starbucks could further strengthen their total community appeal to the point where individuals identified themselves as Starbucks “members”, they would have a daunting defense against other coffee firms and even against the time when coffee is challenged by some other lifestyle beverage.
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