Starbucks: Unicorn Frappaccino Campaign Study
For a brand like Starbucks with 37M Facebook followers, 16M on Instagram fans, 12M Twitter followers and 200K YouTube subscribers it is no surprise that they could craft a masterful social media strategy.
What’s the Unicorn Campaign all about?
Unicorn symbolizes rarity. Leveraging the existing microtrend on unicorn based foods, Starbucks jumped into the bandwagon of stunt foods launching Unicorn Frappaccino on Instagram. The beverage was a neon color-changing pink to purple and flavor-changing sour to sweet, as one consumed it. It was a limited-time menu item being offered for five days. The photogenic picture lured Starbucks fans, who cared less about the 170–500 calories of the beverage. According to Google Trend, search for unicorns ranked an all-time high in 2017.
The campaign garnered high foot traffic to stores especially on the target consumer personas, with people wanting to try it before it was out of stock. Soon consumers started tweeting #unicornfrappuccino #unicornstarbucks and posting pictures, videos and their opinions on Unicorn frap. Some radio shows even went on Facebook Live to share their experiences. It was an immediate social media sensation especially amongst millennials. While the beverage also had a few negative reviews from celebrities like Katy Perry mentioning it as awful tasting, youngsters regardless wanted to try it out for themselves with fear of missing out (FOMO).
Key Stats
- Run date: April 19th to 23rd 2017 for all 8000 US stores, Canada and Mexico
- Launched on Instagram, 155K Instagram posts with the hashtag
- Additional platforms where audiences posted includes Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Snapchat
- Won best mobile campaign of the year
- Global same-store sales increased by 3% the following quarter and continued for weeks after the campaign launch
User generated content - Stores that typically made 40–45 fraps a day had 170+ orders
- The power of user generated content (UGC) cannot be undermined. Check https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/starbucksunicornfrappuccino/ and you will see all the UGC. Social media can be a powerful tool in improving brand awareness
Why it worked?
The campaign picked on a popular microtrend and created sensation with an exclusive offer. April 9th was then popularized as National Unicorn Day, and Starbucks was smart to time their campaign. It tapped on consumer’s trigger and need for scarcity / FOMO by pushing the content of a visually appealing beverage that they wouldn’t want to miss. UGC further created peer pressure. Everyone wanted to post this whimsical drink to their Insta pages. Starbucks is great at not engaging their audiences and responding in a friendly tone to tweets and posts of users and also retweeting them. Some were not a fan of the drink, regardless Starbucks responded with empathy to their posts. This approach has contributed to the success of the brand’s campaign. This campaign demonstrated how powerful brand evangelists could be, regular consumers who can influence their social networks and stir excitement and curiosity that a campaign cannot achieve single-handedly.
References
https://www.marketingdive.com/news/mobile-campaign-of-the-year-starbucks-unicorn-frappuccino/510799/
