My Starbucks Idea
May 1, 2008This is fabulous example of a global company reaching out to its customer base and giving them the opportunity to share their ideas on how to reinvigorate its customer experience. Of course, the idea is only as good as Starbucks’ willing to adopt any of the suggestions that are made – and from what I’ve seen, they’re taking steps to do just that.
I’d like to see more companies taking this kind of approach – and it ties into some thinking I’ve been doing recently around brands and how they become more porous…
barbd 
Good Layout and design. I like your blog. I just added your RSS feed to my Google News Reader. .
Jason Rakowski
as you say, setting up the website is the easy bit and living it is the hard bit.
http://www.dellideastorm.com/ has been dominated by suggestions that dell sell computers without windows/with linux for more than a year. i believe it caused a lot of squirming at dell hq and a very half hearted response in modifying the product range (judging by a look at http://www.dell.co.uk/ today at least). partly i think dell probably just don’t believe the suggestions are representative of the entire customer base – more that a particular lobby have organised themselves to campaign using idea storm.
we’ll see what starbucks do if there’s a strong lobby for them to do something that they aren’t comfortable doing (like selling coffee at a reasonable price).
YEs – and your comment makes me think that companies should have a better way of dealing with lobbying. Kind of like when you doa focus group, you start to see ‘group think’, and social norms emerging within a closed group.
Hmm, shall think more about it…