Allowing the outside world to tell you what you are doing wrong
Posted on 20. Jul, 2010 by Gommit in Blog
This is a quote from a recent refreshing Harvard Business Review interview where Howard Schultz explains the Starbucks turnaround. Using social media and crowdsourcing has been a key factor in how Starbucks is listening and engaging with their customers.
Their idea crowdsourcing site My Starbucks Idea was one of the first site of it’s kind adopted by a fortune 500 company as a real effort in listening to customers. It is also obvious that it has full support from management as it’s still going strong. Ideas are being worked on and information about implementation status actively fed back to the community.
I’d like to thank Howard personally as I use this site in all my presentations and demos where I need to explain the potential of crowdsourcing to management. Thank you for making my job easy 
Here is the chapter from the interview that caught my eye:
How, exactly, do you reach out?
The dipper well was a lesson. We assembled a group of very smart people who understand the world I just described and live it every day. And we created not a tool kit but a new way of behaving, of being proactive and creating ways in which we could connect the dots through a landscape of multiple digital media and social media channels and could become a relevant, trusted source rather than a promoter of a product or ideas. With help, we set up a website to seek ideas from customers. There was great resistance inside to allowing the outside world to tell us what we are doing wrong. But the openness led to a different mentality. We weren’t myopic about who we were and how we were going to go to market. We became more open and vulnerable, listened to people, and as a result started creating a new methodology, a new language, and new tools and tactics that enabled us to become best of class. We’re the number one brand on Facebook.
What does that get you?
It means that 7 million people are very interested in what we are doing and what we have to say. It has changed our go-to-market strategy—how we communicate, unveil, and innovate, and ultimately how we arrive in the marketplace. The success of the things we have done this year is directly linked to the fact that the cost of customer acquisition and communicating to the outside world is significantly lower for us than it is for people who are spending money on traditional advertising or haven’t got this right. The feedback loop is making us better because of the insight we are gaining from that audience. We never were a traditional advertiser, and our marketing dollars were typically spent in the store, because our baristas and word of mouth built that brand. While that’s still the case today, social media now give us another way to connect to customers.