Starbucks adopts Mobile to target Chinese Consumers

Starbucks, the US multinational coffee house chain, with the motive of engage young and affluent Chinese consumers, has partnered with Guohe Ad to leverage and explore the potential in mobile tools such as geo-location services and apps.

The partnership will run an advertising campaign across applications that are provided by Weico, the social media platform, Business Value, the magazine, and Days Matter, a calendar and diary app. These channels were selected specifically to attract youthful, comparatively high earning office workers in three markets – Shanghai, Jiangsu and Zheijing.

Being more specific about the campaign, the ads promoted a special offer from the US multinational so as in to reward customers “checking in” at one of 200 stores with a larger size of drink.

Having to regard as the best channel to reach the intended target audience due to its popular third-party application featured on the local micro-blog, Sina Weibo, similar to Twitter boasting over 3m registered members with 500,000 active users daily,  was Weico.

The efforts from Starbucks, in just two days from 18-20 December, generated 40,000 daily impressions, and managed to receive a clickthrough rate of 1.4%, a figure that is bettering usual industry benchmarks.

Another area where the giant is to exploit is the 3G mobile subscribers as approximately 10% of China’s 900m subscribers now use 3G networks, and this rate is expected to significantly surge over the months to come.

Commenting on the above, Lu Huang, Marketing Director, Starbucks Coffee Shanghai, said “It is the first time for Starbucks to tap mobile advertising in China and it is really an impressive campaign.” The objective of this is to take Starbucks into the so-called “fourth place”, a digital representation of its role as the “third place” for consumers after home and work.

Lu further added “The ad targeting and integration of social media efficiently helped Starbucks to convert mobile users into our real customers. It also enabled Starbucks to celebrate Christmas with customers in the online and offline world, and communicate the idea of Starbucks fourth place experiences.”

Data sourced from MarketWatch; additional content by MP Staff