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Starbucks the Publisher: What Is Starbucks’ Content Strategy?

Starbucks Coffee Lid photo by Gary Allard. All rights reserved.

WiFi at Starbucks is now free, hooray! Not only that, but also the coffee company will soon publish custom online content only available within Starbucks, according to this article published in Wired magazine.

Wait: Content only available at a Starbucks, including the Wall Street Journal? How brilliant. It’s got exclusivity. It’s got addiction potential. It even has mystery … what will it cover?

I’m really curious to see what the Starbucks Web content strategy looks like. If you have a copy, will you smuggle it to me? I wonder if the content will:

  • Support the Starbucks brand?
  • Have a unique voice, mission, or theme?
  • Evolve as they collect reader profile data?
  • Reflect the tastes of the Starbucks coffee drinker?
  • Be savable or downloadable?
  • Include consumer generated content and interaction?
  • Be crawled and flagged throughout search engines and social media (outside of Starbucks)?
  • Be archived or released to Yahoo and AOL at a later date?
  • Be so compelling, we’ll be willing to pay for it outside of Starbucks?

I like to encourage businesses to become publishers — especially businesses that have deep understanding, expertise, and experience in a certain topic or genre (and the content development resources). In this case, however, I’m concerned the Web content strategy is simply to be a proprietary content aggregator. With so much potential loaded behind this content model, I do hope to be surprised!

What do you think Starbucks’ content strategy will look like this fall? I’d love to hear your prediction.

Photo credit: iPhone photo of Starbucks coffee lid courtesy of Gary Allard. All rights reserved.

Posted by Shelly Bowen on Jun 14, 2010. Filed under Web Content Strategy

 

1 Comment | RSS feed for comments on this post

  • Seems to me their content strategy is all about exclusivity and equivalency. Exclusivity in the sense that content that someone would shy away from paying for (due to ingrained resistance to the paid content model) is freely available at a place they would dropping by anyway. This will naturally lead to an increase in the casual visit to Starbucks – folks will drop by for a single cuppa (or two) and to

    Comment by Chris Moritz on Jun 16, 2010

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