For those of you that know me, it comes as no surprise that I'm a huge Starbucks fan and have raved about their loyalty program and app since its launch. As I mentioned in the Walgreens post, Starbucks pioneered the use of the barcode scanner on a mobile device to make using the loyalty program a breeze.
Perusing through my emails this morning, I opened one from Starbucks announcing new features to the program that make it faster, tastier and quicker than before. Make your calendars for Tuesday, October 16 to take advantage of these new benefits.
Users now only have to accumulate 12 stars as opposed to 15.
Stars will now include purchases on both food AND drink.
The reward is loaded immediately onto your app (or physical card for those non-app users) meaning we no longer have to wait for snail mail!
With the changes happening less than a week after Apple announced their new iPhone 5 I can't help but applaud Starbucks on the strategic timing of their upgrades. According to CNET, over 2 million orders have already placed. Coincidence? I think not.
If you turn on the computer and fire up Google Chrome, Gmail, Facebook and a bunch of other websites that help us with our daily lives only to not get connected, I'm sure a few choice words exit your mouth as they do for many of us. In recapping the first week of my MKT 595: Internet and Interactive Marketing class we started at the very beginning - How the Internet Works. For most people who are connected online they could not even begin to explain how it works. I don't necessarily have much more of an understanding than most but here's a little tutorial you can throw this around at a cocktail party and sound like an IT wiz.
Internet: A global network that links computers through an IP address. IP address: A unique identifier that links one computer to the other on the Internet (network). Domain Name Service: The process of translating IP addresses to domain names. As humans we'd much rather remember Facebook.com than a bunch of numbers. Telephone numbers are hard enough these days. World Wide Web: The WWW is an application that actually lays on top of the Internet and is a series of interlinked documents which we better refer to them as web pages. Web Servers: Servers that host web pages. Web Browser: Software that is used to view web pages like Microsoft IE, Google Chrome, Apple Safari and Mozilla Firefox. This may solve your next Internet crisis but hopefully makes you feel a little more aware of how things work in our ever connected online lives.
