Starbucks is the world’s leading purveyor of coffee and a retail maverick. The company has built a sound business model on taking its products to the people—wherever they happen to be. To best support this business model, Starbucks has a distributed marketing operation to drive awareness and promotions in the field. Yet, with over 14,000 locations, maintaining strict brand standards and message oversight was an overwhelming task.

Starbucks needed a way to empower its field marketing staff and local store management to execute store promotions, but ensure that strong brand guidelines were always in place. MarketForward worked with Starbucks to develop a user-friendly Web tool that enables its field marketing and operations staff to create localized marketing materials and signage. The comprehensive solution allows the field teams to create and localize everything from direct mail flyers, to in-store signage, to highway billboards.

Since deploying the solution throughout its field operations, Starbucks has realized a significant reduction in the cost and manpower required to develop customized marketing materials. Now, only the right materials for each store are created, in a much more rapid fashion, and still under strict brand guidelines. Starbucks corporate is now able to have a complete purview into the materials being created, as well being able to manage those activities against a field budget.