Hasta La Gadget!

Starbucks Japan is now celebrating its 15th anniversary in Japan, and has put out a special limited edition double latte available in convenience stores nationwide.

In fact, To treat their convenience store customers who buy the popular RTD iced coffees, Starbucks is promoting a campaign called “Share with a Friend”. By giving the sticker on top to someone you like (such as, in my case, me), they can redeem it for a small coffee at a retail Starbucks location.

They’ve also created an anniversary video thanking Japan for its business, though it’s rather odd that they don’t even support embedding of the video, but rather just getting people to link to it. I will never understand why companies do this besides the strange belief that they will benefit more from getting web traffic than from simply exposing as many people as possible to the video. Clearly I linked to it, but I don’t count, right?

We (CScout Japan) recently did some street-level consumer research for Starbucks here in Japan, and it was interesting what warm feelings the brand had among the people we talked to. I’d like to see Excelsior or Tully’s activate the same response here. Starbucks has done some great retail renewal projects recently to coincide with their new logo as well, and we’re happy for their success.