Our real-world testing was highlighted in the Harvard Business Review
To keep your audience looking hot
How about a dash of Tabasco in your caramel macchiato?
Starbucks recently unveiled a spicy new side of their beverage offering: Spicy Lemonade Refreshers. The new drinks mix spicy with sweet, a departure from the coffee chain’s usual flavor profile.
Is this a smart move? Maybe. Of the roughly 53 million Starbucks fans in the US, 17 million are also spicy food fans. More importantly, there are 31 million spicy food fans who are not currently Starbucks fans. Will heat-lovers who never indulged in a Venti Latte explore the new beverage line? Will spicy fire up a growth platform for Starbucks
Most people are familiar with Venn diagrams. They are commonly used in product development to compare feature sets or show the tensions between customer needs and product capabilities. But what about using them much earlier in the process?
Analyzing audience interests and behavior is a useful way to identify ideas for new product development. Finding overlaps between a brand’s fan base and other passions and interests provides a quantifiable starting point for ideation.
The trick is finding enough overlap within your current base to suggest a ready market for your new offering but also enough non-overlap to offer a growth opportunity. On top of that, your cross-category amalgam has to make sense for your brand.
Identifying how a customer base overlaps with other interests and brands is a powerful start to an innovation process. Our first step is to isolate a brand’s pool of fans; then, we explore adjacencies.
Let’s use Starbucks as a case study. With a large pool of current fans, there are plenty of other interests that unite portions of Starbucks lovers. Do they also offer a potential growth market for the coffee behemoth? Here are three Venn diagrams that we believe are worth exploring…
Beauty-related supplements are a hot category. Ingestible collagen in particular is having a field day. There’s not a lot of regulation, though, so quality and efficacy is uneven. And it’s not the most pleasant product to ingest—the taste of powdered supplements is often yucky.
Could Starbucks bring quality control and a better taste experience to collagen? Could a tasty collaccino attract new customers to the brand?
How many times do you walk into a Starbucks and see someone who looks like they just wrapped up a session at Barry’s Boot Camp? Surely the overlap of people who work out and those who need a Starbucks fix is pretty high? Do some of them offer a growth opportunity for Starbucks? Could new CTT technology-boosted beverages on the menu bring some new customers into the Starbucks mix?
Hi, dogs! We see you waiting for your people outside our local Starbucks. The overlap for this group is significant—beyond their free Puppuccinos, could Starbucks entice pet owners with dog treats? What if the treats were such a standout that they brought pet owners over the Starbucks threshold for the first time?
Want to see into the behavioral soul of your fan base? Let us show you the best places to hunt for new ideas.
