Coffee shops are blooming everywhere, but there is still only one Starbucks. Its success is not accidental, but stems from a positioning logic completely different from traditional cafes. This article dissects, from three dimensions—audience positioning, service strategy, and promotion methods—how Starbucks precisely targets white-collar workers, how it uses space and equipment design to accelerate customer flow, and how it places its marketing focus on brand image rather than the product itself. It also analyzes the real implementation of the "third place" concept in the Chinese market and how this concept has trapped many local cafe owners in operational difficulties. For coffee lovers and industry practitioners, understanding Starbucks' atypical path helps rethink the survival logic of coffee brands.
There are countless coffee shops, but there is only one Starbucks. If you think about it carefully, you will find that its positioning is somewhat different from other coffee shops on the market, making it a representative of atypical success in the industry.
Audience Positioning: Saying One Thing and Doing Another
Starbucks defines its consumer group as white-collar workers.
Note that in Starbucks' positioning in China, white-collar is a state, not an identity. Among urban white-collar workers, quite a large group are artsy youth, who are also heavy consumers of coffee shops, but Starbucks will absolutely not position itself on a state like "artsy youth," even though they have a high probability of being the same person. Why is that? Please read on patiently.
When Chinese people think of cafes, what flashes in their minds is a sunny afternoon, leaning back in a comfortable chair, a cup of coffee at hand, and you whiling away time in a room filled with the aroma of fresh coffee beans.
Therefore, ordinary cafes tend to choose quiet places, and even in popular locations they choose corner spots. Starbucks, however, prefers business districts, office buildings, and shopping malls, usually in conspicuous and bustling places, and even does not shy away from street-facing locations. Popular landmarks are typical white-collar territory, and conspicuous locations allow them to reach the store immediately without spending too much time.
Starbucks' bright white storefront is also one of the reasons it is easier to spot. The brand uses a white-and-green color scheme, appearing simple and natural. The approach of abandoning complicated decorations is actually also catering to the taste of urban white-collar workers, appearing perfectly in tidy and efficient office buildings. This makes Starbucks feel a little less like a "cafe" and more like a convenient, fast coffee takeaway shop, which is also an important difference between it and other coffee shops.
Why position it this way?
Market demand for cafes falls into two types. One is a place for leisure and relaxation in life scenarios, and the other is demand in work scenarios. White-collar workers need a coffee shop during work that is reachable at any time, provides decent-quality coffee, and allows them to take a brief break amid busy work.
The Starbucks we see in China clearly all satisfy work-scenario demand, but this was actually not Starbucks' earliest positioning.
In the late 1980s, Howard Schultz gathered a group of investors to buy Starbucks and, borrowing the words of American sociologist Ray Oldenburg, proposed positioning Starbucks as a "third place"—besides the office and home, you can also go to Starbucks to pass the time. This concept full of Italian flavor quickly conquered most American consumers, and people gradually got used to going to Starbucks for coffee rather than making it at home. This allowed Starbucks to expand rapidly, not only in the United States but also gradually around the world. In 1992, Starbucks successfully went public.
But the problem is, if Starbucks had insisted on the positioning of the third place for passing time, it would have been absolutely impossible for it to grow into today's giant.
Starbucks certainly recognized this. In 1994, Howard Schultz hired the famous designer Wright Massey to assist Starbucks' new chain-store expansion plan, including store design, table and chair heights, and counter standardization. Most importantly, this plan replaced most of the ceramic coffee cups for products in Starbucks stores with paper cups that saved more labor. This was actually more like a signal sent by Starbucks: we want to be faster and more convenient.
If the sense of relaxation in Howard Schultz's "third place" is 100 points, then actually visiting Starbucks will only make you feel about 60 points—not too comfortable, yet slightly relaxed.
The result of this is that in the minds of its core consumers, white-collar workers, Starbucks gradually became like the ubiquitous McDonald's and Burger King, no longer a place where one could "act cool." Starbucks was no longer the "third place" full of dreamy colors in Americans' hearts. Ask yourself: a store that lets customers spend an entire afternoon over one cup of coffee—what would it use to pay rent, and how could it possibly bloom all over the world?
It is precisely fast-foodization that made Starbucks what it is today. But after Schultz returned to Starbucks, he made a high-profile self-reflection: "Rapid expansion has made Starbucks more commercialized," "The unchanging approach is making customers' passion for coffee disappear," "Recover the lost traditional culture"... Yet what we see is that Starbucks in China is still advancing along the old path.
Why did Schultz shout these slogans that do not match the actual situation?
Because Starbucks is still expanding! Because the tactics used during the nationwide expansion in the United States in the 1980s still work in China today!
In today's United States, the ubiquitous Starbucks has nothing to do with the "third place," but when entering other countries' markets, this is still the best marketing ignition point. Starbucks stores in China are generally located in office buildings or commercial districts. During weekday lunch breaks, shopping breaks, meetups with a few friends, and so on, consumers are very easily "bewitched" by Starbucks and go in to buy a cup, but Starbucks' in-store setup absolutely does not encourage you to sit for an entire afternoon.
As The Economist said, "Schultz's desire to return Starbucks to its roots will seemingly conflict with the company's established goal of growing to 40,000 stores worldwide." This incisive comment makes Schultz's reflection look very affected, a full case of benefiting from the situation while still playing the victim.
Yet the concept of the third place has led other Chinese cafe owners inspired by Starbucks into a ditch. They try their best to make their stores "slow" and are also committed to turning their stores into a "third place." But those cafes built according to the idea of passing time, with strong artistic atmosphere and successfully attracting artsy youth, all operate miserably. Too-low table turnover simply cannot support cost pressures such as rent. If they want to raise prices, consumers' psychological price point has been anchored by Starbucks at around 30 yuan. Coffee shops in business districts even have to rely on simple lunch meals at noon to barely survive, and in the end all close hastily.
Countless female white-collar workers with artsy hearts (who are also typical Starbucks customers) regard "sitting in the cafe I opened and having afternoon tea with a couple of besties" as their life ideal. We must solemnly tell you: what you open will be a money-burning machine.
So Starbucks appears to be competing with the entire coffee shop industry, but in fact it is in a blue ocean of a segmented market, firmly grasping this demand and successfully pushing this demand globally, becoming one of the representative brands of white-collar consumption.
Service Positioning: Driving Customers Away
Although white-collar workers have been mercilessly ignored in the coffee industry and continuously fork out large amounts of money for Starbucks, Starbucks has not been soft-hearted toward them because of this. Instead, driven by profit, it has customized a special set of service standards, with the purpose of "driving" white-collar workers out of the store.
This is for the key point of profitability for food and beverage businesses—increasing table turnover. From the moment you enter, Starbucks has set up various links to shorten customers' stay in the store.
In the purchasing stage, stores need to pay the cost of giving customers time to choose products. Fortunately, for coffee drinks, white-collar workers would not spend a lot of time making choices anyway. Starbucks also tries to streamline the variety of coffee drinks. After removing duplicates among different preparation methods of the same category of coffee, there are no more than 30 drinks, and only about 10 food items. There are also no complicated pairings such as combinations or set meals, making it very easy for customers to choose.
Then comes the usage stage. Ordinary coffee shops try their best to satisfy customers' requirements for "comfort" and "warmth," so many customers enter with one cup of coffee and sit until the end of time, which not only fails to increase table turnover but also occupies other sales opportunities. For this reason, many coffee shops choose the approach of increasing average spending per customer, using tactics such as bundling peripheral merchandise to save the situation indirectly, but the effect varies by store and by location.
Starbucks' approach is to make customers feel uncomfortable. The store's decoration abandons the deep, warm tones of cafes and instead is simple and refreshing with hard lines, so it does not feel like a comfortable leisure scene. The seating arrangement is deliberate, specially using some wooden chairs, bar stools, wall-side tables, and other not-so-comfortable furniture, making it impossible for people to sit for long. If you are attentive, you can also feel that Starbucks' air conditioning is usually set lower than that of nearby shops. Think that is a perk? Totally wrong. It is actually to make people uncomfortable and urge you to leave quickly after buying coffee. Starbucks in the United States has even added drive-thru windows for car users, so you do not need to enter the store at all—it has become completely McDonaldized.
Ordinary cafes provide ceramic cups for dine-in customers, which cannot be taken away if not finished, so customers naturally stay longer. But whether for immediate consumption or takeaway, Starbucks uniformly uses paper cup packaging, so customers can take the coffee away at any time.
So rather than defining Starbucks as a cafe, it would be better to say it is a coffee convenience store. Customers who choose to buy and leave far outnumber those who enjoy it in the store. By contrast, for other large chain brands such as COSTA and Pacific Coffee, more people leisurely go online or read in the store.
Promotion Positioning: Not Selling Coffee
Of course it sells coffee, but in marketing it is very different from the coffee brand marketing seen on the market. This difference is reflected on two levels.
First, Starbucks actually has a fairly high appearance rate in people's field of vision, frequently showing up in movies, television, marketing activities, and social networks. In addition, with all-platform self-media promotion and interaction, Starbucks is many levels higher than other brands in terms of promotional volume.
At a deeper level, Starbucks, being in the food and beverage industry, does not put products at the center of its marketing like McDonald's and KFC. Its marketing focus is not taste or ingredients, but brand image. Through product-context education and strong association with specific groups, it connects the brand with emotional concepts such as trendiness, avant-garde, high-end, and taste, enhancing brand premium.
For example, it placed products in the fashion film The Devil Wears Prada. The editor-in-chief of a high-end fashion magazine once specifically requested that a cup of Starbucks coffee be placed on the desk when arriving at the office in the morning. The brand image immediately gained the labels of "fashion" and "high-end." Although in the real world fashion editors might fundamentally think Starbucks represents cheap coffee, only heaven knows what they actually drink. For consumers, the more similar brand associations they see, the more Starbucks' "trendy" attribute is reinforced. This is also one of the reasons trend-chasing white-collar workers flock to Starbucks.
Of course, this was not achieved overnight. Starbucks, originating in the United States, has always been popular among young people. This kind of brand-building activity to create fashionable and trendy characteristics has a long history, so when it appears in fashion films it does not feel jarring and plays a positive role.
For example, in 2013 Starbucks launched an interactive activity on WeChat called "WeChat Starbucks Natural Wake-Up Music Radio." Participants sent a mood symbol to the Starbucks official account and received a piece of mood-specific music. This activity, full of artsy and bourgeois sentiment, effectively enhanced the brand's "prestige."
It seems to have nothing to do with coffee products, and indeed it does not. But the idea and format of the activity resonate emotionally with the brand's main consumer group. The consumption characteristic of white-collar workers is that they attach great importance to brand. With good brand positioning and image, price and even product rank lower by comparison.
Starbucks has established many atypical positionings. Looking back from them, they seem entirely reasonable and undoubtedly accurately grasp the pulse of a specific market. In the face of the awkward situation where the coffee market keeps growing but stores are difficult to sustain, coffee brands may first need to calm down and think carefully about who they really are.
From the moment you enter, Starbucks has set up various links to shorten customers' stay in the store, precisely to increase the key point of profitability for food and beverage businesses—table turnover.
As a food and beverage company, Starbucks does not put products at the center of its marketing like McDonald's and KFC; its marketing focus is not taste or ingredients, but brand image.
The above content is compiled by CoffeeHunters, a coffee news website.
