Starbucks Red Cups

Christmas brings many traditions back that we see companies take part in annually, and Starbucks Red Cups are one of these. As part of the launch of these iconic red cups making an appearance again, the popular coffee shop chain Starbucks created a four-metre high installation made to look like a Christmas tree, created from Starbucks red cups.

The installation was erected in Kings Cross’s train station in London and required customers to tweet in with the hashtag #RedCups and share their red cup moments with pictures. This idea of sharing images and tweets on twitter and Instagram was linked to their social campaign where they wanted customers to tweet their experiences throughout the Christmas period. With each time the hashtag being displayed a limited edition emoji of a Red Cup would appear.

This campaign in London aim was to involve their customers passing by asking them to tweet with #RedCups and the more tweets that were submitted the more the Christmas tree lit up. This campaign is an example of Sensory Marketing as Starbucks were promoting their festive drinks over the Christmas period, by using the human senses to market their product. 

Vision, the four metre high installation was used to attract the attention of consumers. The installation was situated in the middle of a busy London train station and is hard to miss by all commuters passing by. Consumers that were attracted over and took part in these campaign were presented with a gift card from Starbucks to use over the Christmas period, as a way of thanking their customers. As well vision, smell is another sense used. The installation was designed to smell like Starbuck’s product, the Gingerbread Latte, which is a limited edition drink at this season and is a popular drink for this company. 

This smell is something that is aimed to stay in the thoughts of the consumer in hope that they remember about this product later in the day, potentially whilst passing a Starbucks, resulting them in buying a product.