The pool of ideas on the Internet

 
Internet Starbucks asks consumers on the Internet to improve its products. The question is whether this is really about innovation.  
Starbucks is in crisis. There are many reasons for this. The US coffee house chain is struggling with declining sales in its home market, its competitor McDonald's performs better in taste tests and its shares have lost 50 percent of their value on the stock market within a year. Because the empire is running out of customers, the management is currently investing a lot of money in advertising, which contradicts the company's previous policy. The paradigm shift cannot be overlooked on US television. The company launched its first image-oriented TV campaign in November last year. And Starbucks boss Howard Schultz recently announced that the marketing budget would be increased. The company plans to invest 100 million US dollars in the brand this year. This represents a doubling. "Democratic idea machine "The situation is very serious. In order to hold its own against the competition, the company is also spending a lot of money on Internet activities. Starbucks is currently tapping into the creativity of consumers to ensure that the coffee house chain remains one step ahead in the future. To this end, the company has launched the website Mystarbucksidea.com. The site can be described as a "democratic idea machine" or "innovation pool". The offer works along the lines of current Web 2.0 offers. Consumers can write down their suggestions for improvement and other ideas on the site free of charge and thus participate in the development process of new products. Experts talk about the principle of "crowdsourcing" when a company lets its customers work for it. Without payment, of course.
However, the platform launched in mid-March has obviously been well received. Within a few days, the site had thousands of entries. And there are more every day. The wealth of ideas is enormous. For example, one participant called on Starbucks to produce coffee-flavored ice cubes to enhance the taste of the cold drinks on offer. Around 8,000 consumers are in favor of the suggestion. Others call for shelves in the toilets so that the drink can also be enjoyed in a quiet place. However, there are also less unusual demands such as free coffee on birthdays, premium cards for loyal customers or the suggestion to lower prices in general. As can be read in the US newspaper Washington Post, around four dozen Starbucks employees are busy keeping an eye on input from coffee fans.
Poor reward systemFor American media critics, the big hits have so far failed to materialize. The use of the site has even been called into question in the media because the meagre reward system has been questioned. The reason: participants are not paid for their contributions. "Why give ideas to a company if you still have to dig deep into your pocket to pay for the coffee," is the tenor of the critics. Jim Romenesko, operator of the Starbucksgossip blog, even suspects that Mystarbucksidea is more of a "propaganda campaign". The blogger is of the opinion that the increasing criticism of Starbucks on the Internet has prompted the company to polish up its image with the participatory project. Computer giant Dell tried this a year ago with a similar 2.0 thing called "Ideastorm". The hardware manufacturer made negative headlines due to faulty production. "The point is: if we don't offer something like this ourselves, customers will write it down somewhere else. I'd rather it was done by us. That makes us more trustworthy and we can react to it," said CEO Michael Dell a year ago.
Many experts doubt in their specialist blogs whether the Starbucks management will respond to customer wishes. Their assumption is that too much customer orientation poses great risks for a company. The widespread opinion in the boardroom that customer loyalty can simply be built up by listening to your own customers and simply implementing their wishes has proven to be a mistake on several occasions. Focusing too closely on customer needs can quickly lead to a very conservative innovation policy. In principle, customers only act as rear-view mirrors. Their imagination is limited to what they already know. Brand guru Bernd M. Michael, who spoke at this year's Publisuisse Mediavision, has a clear answer to the question of whether brands will be controlled by the consumer or the manufacturer in future: "As a rule, people know exactly what they don't want. But they find it difficult to describe what they want. People's imagination is extremely limited." And trend researcher Norbert Bolz said at this year's Marketing Day in Lucerne: "It's a big misunderstanding to think that if you bring together as many people as possible and get them to work for you, you'll come up with something clever."
In the focus of market researchersThe extent to which the Mystarbucksidea ideas portal will help the coffee company to compensate for the decline in sales will become clear in the coming months. In any case, the project will arouse the interest of market researchers due to the amount of data accumulated. A look at the statistics of its predecessor Ideastorm only gives a rudimentary idea of the dimensions behind such projects: A total of 8,000 ideas were submitted, more than 50,000 comments were written and 500,000 ratings were given. Experts consider traditional focus group models to be obsolete due to such volumes of data. "It's better to listen to what tens of thousands of customers write than to sit ten consumers in a room, feed them sandwiches and then watch what they say about the products," Bob Pearson, who manages community projects for computer manufacturer Dell, is quoted as saying in the Washington Post.
Christian Lüscher