On Dec 6, 2017, Starbucks’ much anticipated “Shanghai Reserve Roastery” opened its doors on Nanjing West Road. This largest Starbucks café in the world has a total floor space of 2700 square meters, following the opening of the first “Reserve Roastery” in Seattle in 2014.

After a busy opening, Starbuck China’s CMO Emily Chang appeared on the stage of the 4^th annual Global Digital Marketing Summit the next day on December 7^th – offering her professional insights on the “consumer experience” to marketers and business leaders in
attendance. Emily has many years of experience in managing teams in multicultural environments, organizational innovation and brand building. Prior to joining Starbucks, Emily served in management positions at Apple and IHG.

A few years back, marketers were still accustomed to BTL (below the line) and ATL (above the line) as marketing buzzwords, while the term O2O gradually emerged – which meant online to offline, or vice versa. Yet for Emily, this term has already become obsolete.

“I think O2O is an inaccurate expression, 2 signifies a one-way journey from one point to another. This is an over simplification and I believe O&O is more appropriate,” Emily stated.

Online
and Offline in the Age of New Retail

Before we create consumer experiences, we must think about the actual uses of online and offline.

If we think back to a week before “double eleven”, many people probably had the experience of browsing for discounted items online in their pajamas. Consumers are able to purchase almost any item anywhere and at any time. For any enterprise, the realm of online has become a crucial place to communicate and engage with customers – and this includes Starbucks.

“The coffee business is shifting towards mobile and digitization, and retailers who are fast and imaginative will be the winners in the industry.” – Kevin Johnson, CEO of Starbucks.

The consumer experience shift and words from CEO Kevin Johnson confirms the digitization of Starbucks, while Emily also touched upon Starbucks’ new social gifting platform on WeChat mini-programs, “I love to send a coffee to my friends, which is a great online interactive experience for our customers”.

As for offline, we must have a human touch and the service must come from the heart. “I probably wouldn’t buy a Dyson blow-dryer worth 500USD online. It is better to be able to test it and feel it first in an offline setting before you take it home.” Emily shared another example from her shopping experience in New York. “I went to this store which was decorated beautifully and smell wonderful, while the store clerks complimented that I looked great in the outfit I tried on, and finally poured me a class of champagne. This is the type of experience you can only find offline. We can educate online users through offline interactions, and also offer experiences that are uniquely from the realm of offline.”

So how do we unite online and offline? Emily believes that the key lies in how information from online is presented offline. “We have been telling the story of the coffee mug, from when coffee beans are selected from the source, and this already raises the expectations of consumers and we must also raise our service standards offline.” She went on to describe the various sensory experiences that Starbucks creates for its customers.

The New Retail Way for a New Kind of Coffee Store

We must of course mention the much celebrated and recently opened Shanghai Reserve Roastery. Coffee and pastry are made onsite, and even the whole brewing process is on display. With the aid of Alibaba’s AR technology driving experience-oriented spending, consumers are now able to see the entire process from a coffee bean to the final cup, and even hidden details in the coffee pot and those behind the counter.

In her Keynote Speech at the Global Digital Marketing Summit, Emily introduced Echo Jiang – the Director of Roastery Consumer Experience at Starbucks China, who shared with the audience the Roastery’s opening and its consumer experience innovations. “At the Reserve Roastery, you will not only see the entire process from coffee bean to the cup, there are also a host of other related offerings onsite, including different pastries and bar areas, as well as hidden menu functions – which can all be purchased at the T-Mall store,” she said. “We also have a digital roadmap for consumers visiting the Roastery, so they will be clear about what is offered onsite in this coffee temple. This gives consumers an immersive experience both online and offline.”

Echo also spoke of the Roastery’s advance booking system. “We don’t want our customers to wait for long in line, so we encourage them to use their iPads to communicate in advance with our staff so they are taken care of when they arrive,” she added. The Roastery also launched a “pay and go” service in association with Alipay – whereby customers can pay via scanning of the QR code and wait to be notified via a message on the Alipay app when their coffee is ready.

Starbucks maintains its focus on the consumer experience in this unification of online and offline, and not the consumer journey. So what is the key difference? Emily shared her perspective in this summary of her speech, “the consumer journey is a single linear process with a start and finish, and with this mindset we are not actually aiming to create a great consumer experience. While at the Shanghai Reserve Roastery, we are tasked with offering a place where consumers can create any experience as they wish, which starts with the first cup of Starbucks coffee.”
 

On Dec 6^th, 2017, at the Global
Digital Marketing Summit held annually in Shanghai, Mondelez China’s Marketing Vice President of the Biscuits Category, Jacky Cao, offered his unique insights
on the dilemma brands are now facing.

In the last 30 years, we have experienced a fundamental change from demand exceeding supply to overabundance, as supply of consumer goods are now clearly surpassing demand in the consumer market – which is a challenge for brand marketers. This competitive environment stemming from abundance continues to intensify, resulting in greater branding challenges as tens of thousands of new consumer goods are launched to the market daily.

The consumer competition in fact consists of two dimensions – time and money. From the basis of “competing for the consumer’s wallet”, brand marketing activities are also based on competition for the consumer’s precious time. From simple practical needs, to more emotional needs, to functional needs, the needs of consumers are constantly upgraded. So how should a brand distinguish itself? Jacky Cao’s answer offered in his speech at the Global Digital Marketing Summit is: to simply do a bit better than your competitor with regards to satisfying consumers’ needs.

Thrive to Satisfy Your Customer’s Needs

Whether on the perspective of product or other dimensions, brands must work hard to meet the expectations of their customers. Oreo is a renowned snack brand globally, while as the family unit continues to shrink, the consumer need for simply eating to satiate hunger is decreasing, while the demand for greater food quality is on the rise. In this light, Oreo’s traditional packaging is at odds with this need. Many consumers have voiced their concern that there are “too many biscuits in Oreo packets”, resulting in over-eating or wastage. In response, the Oreo packets have been reduced to having only six biscuits in each pack from 12 before. This small change managed to give consumers new reason to love Oreo once again.

In addition, the “Oreo Music-box” campaign also generated great success. This campaign managed to give Oreo added value that surpasses the normal psychological need of consumers for food items – it offered an outlet for curiosity and expression of love, as well as individuality. This satisfaction of multiple psychological needs is the basis of its success.

Never Underestimate the Power of the Fan Economy

The power of celebrity is suited to the needs of the current consumer market. The packaging of Mondelez China’s Stride gum brand is a clear example of this – with celebrity themed packaging and distinct packaging codes to further promote the brand. Sales jumped to over 20,000 in less than 2 hours after the launch of the new packaging – as a testament to the power of the fan economy and the marketing benefit of leveraging celebrities.

Bloomberg is packaging up this programmatic creative as a new ad unit, which it’s calling DataLock.

Bank of Montreal and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange Group this quarter agreed to be the first advertisers to use it.

DataLock is designed to reduce banner blindness since it provides financial information of interest to Bloomberg’s readers in the right rail, an area users often ignore.

And the ad unit showcases how Bloomberg’s data can create better ad experiences for consumers.

“We wanted to highlight the power of Bloomberg data and how that data could be married with an advertiser’s message to drive relevance,” said Derek Gatts,Bloomberg’s global head of ad trafficking, technology and product.

Plus, Bloomberg does all the work on behalf of the advertiser. “One of the challenges with programmatic creative is that it’s a burden on the advertisers to build those creative variations. We have those variations built in automatically,” Gatts added.

Bloomberg uses machine learning to dynamically pull the correct company’s information into the ad. A proprietary personalization algorithm ranks companies to determine if Tesla, for example, is the most relevant company in the article.

Because Bloomberg already had these machine learning capabilities in place to power other parts of its site, the team created the new ad product in about a month.

“One of the priorities we had was to come up with ideas we could get into the market quickly that worked with our unique assets in terms of pipes, data and APIs,” said Michael Shane,Bloomberg’s global head of digital innovation, who helps facilitate collaboration between editorial and advertising.

The stock information runs in a 300×600 IAB standard unit on Bloomberg’s redesigned desktop experience. Launched in October, the website template brings content back to the right rail.

Videos run in the right rail, for example, as well as high-impact ads. In the case of DataLock, the ad provides content – a stock price – along with a brand message.

“We can’t effectively do an ad like this if we didn’t prioritize having a clean user experience,” Gatts said. “We removed the noise from the right rail. We allow for multiple ads to roll with you, but it’s not a noisy experience.”

DataLock isn’t Bloomberg’s first effort to merge its content with its advertising.

In August, it rolled out B:Pop, an ad product which paired a content recommendation with an advertiser’s message. Since Bloomberg has invested both in data and in APIs to make that data readily available, Gatts and Shane expect to roll out more data-driven ad products.

“This is the first step down a path of ‘altered relevance,’” Gatts said, or using personalization to make content and ads more relevant to the user seeing that ad.

In the meantime, it will try to attract more advertisers to the product and work at rolling out DataLock on mobile. Bloomberg also wants to offer the unit programmatically via automated guaranteed deals. But in the meantime, it’s only selling the ads directly and onBloomberg properties.

“Long term, my goal is for advertisers to look at Bloomberg as a platform with data and APIs that can create an interesting, dynamic ad experience, whether it’s programmatic or totally custom,” Shane said.