Baseball and a “cup of coffee” – the idiom for a short time spent by a minor league player at the major league level – have long been intertwined.
But when it comes to customer experience, the two may have more in common than you thought.
This summer, Washington Post deputy sports editor Lacy Lusk wrote about visiting his 30th – and final – MLB ballpark in San Diego 30 years after he visited his first in Baltimore, achieving a lifelong goal.
And the reason why Lusk dedicated three decades crisscrossing the country and investing significant time and money to achieve a sports goal, wasn’t because every MLB ballpark offers the same experience. Rather, it was because they each offer something different.
“Every stadium, and for that matter practically ever game, provides something worth remembering,” Lacy wrote in a piece for his newspaper, explaining the enduring passion that fueled his pursuit.
Starbucks sells coffee, not baseball. But when it comes to customer experience, it too understands how differentiation can be a home run for a brand.
Recently, Fast Company shared the story of how Starbucks has gone from a company where the interior design of every store felt pretty much the same to a company that’s now working to make each of its 23,000 locations feel different.
“Starbucks builds some of the most architecturally stunning coffee shops in the world,” writes Fast Company, “In a historic bank on Rembrandtplein Square in Amsterdam, a ceiling undulates with 1,876 blocks of Dutch oak. On a double-decker train car in Switzerland, a 50-seat Starbucks with table service allows commuters from the Geneva Airport to unwind. Each location is a gorgeous piece of design that makes a strong nod to its context. It just so happens that they also sell coffee.”
In MLB terms, Pittsburgh’s PNC Park, Baltimore’s Camden Yards, San Francisco’s AT&T Park could be described as examples of gorgeous pieces of design that just happen to sell baseball.
To that end, Starbucks VP of design Bill Sleeth says he thinks about the company’s stores less in terms of stringent brand standards and more as a kind of intrinsic feeling with his goal being to foster more of what people call “my Starbucks” and less what people call “that Starbucks.”
“Sometimes when you look at the ‘my Starbucks’ and the ‘that Starbucks’ people, you’ll see there’s really something different between them,” says Sleeth. “The my just feels more comfortable. It feels more natural.”
Die-hard baseball fans can be just similarly passionate about their home ballparks – not unlike regular customers can be for their neighborhood Starbucks – but that doesn’t diminish MLB fans’ desire to see what other stadiums also have to offer. The same may go for Starbucks loyalists who travel and choose to still pop in to a local shop in different cities.
A big part of that desire is the consumers now can count on the consistent quality of the product – whether it be big league baseball or a grande espresso – but they may be just as eager to enjoy a unique environment and customer experience.
Your company might not be in the business of selling either ballgames or java, but you can still think about how to offer customer experiences that sets your brand apart.
To read more of AE Marketing Group’s insights about customer experience, simply click here.