My Starbucks idea- success or failure?

"My Starbucks Idea" is the site of Starbucks where Internet users all around the world can register and post their ideas about how to improve Starbucks business, than vote for other Internet user ideas, leave comments and see the implementation of the best ideas. The point is that customers know better than anyone else what they want to improve  in Starbucks.

The idea is really simple- you as a customer post your idea, then other Internet users will vote if they like your idea, their comment your post, discuss it and if your idea get a lot of attention (votes), Starbucks will implement this idea and Starbucks will improve customer satisfaction.

It’s a good and clever point to listen your customers and threw listening get their involvement and their ideas. Internet users discuss them, comment, say their opinion. When they post their idea, their spread this message to all social networks they are involved and Starbucks get a lot of attention.

 In this way Starbucks also implement the idea Starbucks is all about experience, it’s not just a cup of coffee. They have created this feeling into customers minds that they are the 3 place between work and home.

So, this in my opinion is the success part of the campaign- perfect engagement with customers and personalized communication. Then where is the dark side? I made some research and found a lot of articles about the failure of this campaign. “My Starbucks Idea, despite receiving over 75,653 ideas, has only implemented 315 ideas to-date, an even more miserly 0.4% of the total.” The negative aspect is that they are claiming to be a company which are listening their customers and get the input from them. At the same time it’s clear that they actually don’t use it. It’s like a cheating, because they actually implement the customer ideas which they already had in their minds. Here you can read about it. So they declare that they have implemented customer ideas when actually, they haven’t. So you get a feeling of cheating and  create some kind of gap between customer satisfaction and customer expectation.

In conclusion, my opinion is that in terms of social marketing campaign, it’s a success, the way they promote their website and their brand idea is great, but from improving business from customer research is a failure. Customers are not stupid. And I don't mean here the "Diesel" stupidness. I hope that kind of stupidness is inside of all of us!