Starbucks switches digital for out-of-home to create noise around UK Teavana launch
Starbucks has switched up the marketing strategy around its Teavana range in the UK, ‘dialling up’ its outdoor spend instead of leading with digital in the hope that a high impact launch will pitch tea alongside coffee as part of the fabric of the Starbucks brand.
Starbucks Teavana
Out-of-home will form the back bone of the Teavana campaign in lieu of spending big on TV advertising, according to Starbucks’ digital marketing manager Jamie McQuary, who told The Drum that the idea was to market the brand “a lot bigger than we normally do”, by buying large format digital sites and bus wraps to create a “high impact, visual launch”.
“When we launched the campaign back in July we wanted to make sure we were driving awareness and getting the product name out there and people in store,” McQuary said, “So we went big in out-of-home and digital display.”
The next step was to line up the Teavana product with lifestyle content, offering Grazia readers a free Starbucks Teavana iced tea as part of its summer partnership with the magazine. Influencers were then invited to a Teavana yoga event, and encouraged to post images and create shareable content to market the range by word-of-mouth.
It marks a change in strategy for Starbucks, which takes a digital-first approach to much of its marketing. The chain unveiled an official emoji keyboard comprising 28 Starbucks-specific icons for coffee lovers to share in April, while mobile ordering and digital loyalty offerings are both major drivers of Starbucks’ growth, as announced in its Q1 2016 earnings, and provide the opportunity to up sell and market to consumers in-app.
The launch of Teavana this summer is “just the beginning” with another campaign dedicated to tea in the works. The idea is for the tea brand to live alongside coffee, and become a part of the Starbucks brand. Tea is something Starbucks feels is going to “drive incremental revenue” for the business, with McQuary adding “we are known for coffee but we want tea to become a part of everything we do out of store”.
The tea range was first introduced to Starbucks stores in the US in 2012, after the coffee chain acquired the Teavana brand. In the US, Teavana has its own stores, since the brand had an existing retail footprint upon acquisition.
There is potential to launch standalone Teavana stores in the UK “if the brand gets as big as it is in the States” added McQuary. The strategy for EMEA is to use the Starbucks stores to establish more of a range, and build out from there.
In terms of expanding the range the ice tea is “just scratching the surface” for Starbucks, with a whole range of hot teas as well as tea lattes coming out soon.
In June beer maker Anheuser-Busch InBev and Starbucks announced a partnership for the brewer to produce, bottle and distribute a ready-to-drink line of the Teavana brand tea in the U.S. It marked a serious move by Starbucks to broaden its reach beyond coffee, to find new avenues of growth.
On whether the tea tie-up between AB InBev and Starbucks will expand to the UK at some point, McQuary said “there are no specific plans”, but added “the way things go is we will launch something in the US, see how it performs, then bring something over to the UK and the rest of Europe”.