Starbucks Ideas

Thanks to Mark Riffey at Business is Personal for pointing out the MyStarbucksIdea web site.  Like Mark, I'm not a big fan of the Seattle coffee chain.  I prefer to order my coffee au natural, no cream, no steam, no foam, no whipped cream, just a large cup of coffee.  At seven o'clock in the morning, I'm usually in no mood to remember whether large is Venti, or Grande, or whatever.  Just give me your biggest cup of plain coffee.

Anyway, you can't argue with their success, even without my business.  Their latest initiative, MyStarbucksIdea.com, invites customers to submit their ideas for making Starbucks better with the promise that someone from the company is actually looking at the ideas and that the good ones will be implemented.  Readers are encouraged to vote on each idea.  The number of comments on some of the ideas is running in the hundreds with the top idea of all time drawing over 600.

If you aren't in the coffee business the idea of a stopper to keep hot coffee from splashing out through the hole in the lid may not mean much to you (except as a coffee consumer), but as a retailer you should be monitoring the site.  Several of the ideas that have been submitted can be used in other situations, or may inspire you to come up with similar ideas of your own.

Surprisingly the site doesn't provide an RSS feed so you'll have to check it manually and you need a Starbucks.com account to make suggestions or comments, or to cast a vote.  But it's certainly worth a bookmark and a look every once in a while.

Comments

[Robert]

I agree with your analysis. Stoppers for coffee are not obvious, until you hit that speed bump and the coffee shoots out of the hole and coats your dashboard.

Beyond that, let's say you own or manage a smaller company without the resources of Starbucks. You’re looking for ideas about how to improve your products or services. Your customers could probably point you in the right direction. How do you tap into all the ideas that they could come up with?

That's why we created brainstorm exchange. www.brainstormexchange.com It gives you, companies of all sizes and even non-profits, an easy to use, free or very affordable solution to solicit and collect ideas from customers, suppliers, employees, and other companies.