Why have "Say It with Starbucks” (用星说)?

Feb. 10^th, WeChat wallet had a new third party service called “Say It with Starbucks” (用星说), which is a social product. By this service, customers can buy coffee and gift card, with blessing message, photos or videos, for their WeChat friends. Now, this service is only available in Mainland.

While two months ago, December 18^th, 2016, WeChat and Starbucks announced to begin strategic cooperation in Guangzhou. More than 2400 Starbucks stores in China accessed to WeChat Pay. Before that, there are Apple pay, Samsung Pay and Starbucks APP Pay. According to financial report of Starbucks, its sales is not good as expectation while sales of China and the Asia-Pacific region grew fastest (23%). On the other hand, monthly active user of WeChat has reached 846 million by the third season,2016 and more than half use WeChat Pay. To improve the sales, cooperate with China local mobile payment party is a good choice.

WeChat is also famous for red packet (微信红包) on the account of Chinese culture. 

While “Say It with Starbucks” can be seen as the transformation of the red packet, it advocates to bless someone you care by sending coffee or gift card. Such value is easy to accept by youngsters. In this case, this service will increase the possibility for new customers to try it which can increase the brand awareness and improve the brand image.

Youngsters and white collars are important target segments for Starbucks while these targets are more likely to be active user of WeChat. The overlapping part of user provide great opportunity for “Say It with Starbucks” which aims at reminding current customers that Starbucks can serve you more than a cup of coffee but also help you to express feeling and send blessings. With that, current customers are easily to become loyal customers by increasing the purchasing frequency and brand penetration.

Besides the branding strategy, “Say It with Starbucks” relates with Long Tail. The customers of Starbucks in China are so diverse that there are many customer fragments. On other words, there are niche markets. On account of the growing of WeChat user, part of who are also customers of Starbucks, WeChat user can be developed as a niche market. Therefore, with WeChat Pay and “Say It with Starbucks”, there are more accesses to this niche market. In this case, the “tail”is fattened so as the business itself.

In addition, the Beneficiaries of “Say It with Starbucks”is not only Starbucks, but also WeChat. As we all known, the competition between WeChat Pay and Alipay is very fierce while Starbucks is the target client of both companies. The cooperation of WeChat and Starbucks has shown the competitiveness of WeChat which can improve the branding among potential companies. What is more, “Say It with Starbucks” applied to “promotion during limit time” (限时推广) , it can become another cooperate format between WeChat and its clients. However, it takes time to evaluate this new business model.

“Say It with Starbucks” already finished the “promotion during limit time” but existed in its official WeChat account. Since the service is quite new and needs more promotion, the effect is still unknown. Whereas, it shows how to work with payment company which is a promising market in the foreseeable future.  

Reference:

1.     http://www.pingwest.com/wechat-starbuck/ 微信上线升级版“红包”：发钱多俗气，咱还是来张更有范儿的星巴克礼品卡吧！

2.     http://www.tmtpost.com/2567240.html微信与星巴克合推用星说，小卡背后憋了个什么大招？

    

3. https://mp.weixin.qq.com/sbiz=MzI4NDM4MDY5NQ==&mid=2247484509&idx=1&sn=36ed99024163e171dc17b3933c6ca9e7 星巴克在微信推出了 “用星说” ，你会因此喝得更多吗？

4.     http://wallstreetcn.com/node/252592 2016年WeChat用户报告发布！