OK, I admit it, I’m a Starbucks junkie!  There’s a Starbucks near where I live. My morning walk takes me past it and I almost always grab a coffee (Venti Flat White, for those who are interested).

Anyway, even on my morning walk my little brain is working away looking out for marketing lessons.  Recently I noticed something interesting in Starbucks.

First a little background.  I live in the Sydney Metro area, near North Sydney, which is a satellite business district to the main CBD in Sydney proper.  One of the main businesses in North Sydney was a big telco company called Optus.  Recently, they decided to relocate their offices out to a business park in one of the suburbs.

Optus had occupied pretty much all of the space in one of the larger office blocks in North Sydney.  Moving out had a big impact on the number of people in the area and the traffic of local retail businesses.  Now the building has been re-leased but it’s being refurbished and won’t be open for a few months yet.

My Starbucks is just across the road from what was the Optus building and their traffic must have been hit like other businesses.  Now what I noticed one morning was that they had out some leaflets with details of how to order coffee for delivery.

So what’s so great about this, you ask?  Well, it reminded me of a lesson I heard from Mal Emery recently.  That is, when your business takes a dive because the market shrinks (for whatever reason) you MUST grab a bigger slice of the pie if you want to survive and prosper. 

In the short term, you don’t have a lot of choice.  Yes, you can look to add value and new services etc.  Yes, you can maybe expand into other areas.  But short term, you need to expand your “Share of Wallet”.  That’s what Starbucks was aiming to do, albeit in a not terribly full bloodied way.

What are good ways to expand your “Wallet Share”?  Customer Loyalty Programs (“Buy 5 get the next one free” etc) and anything you can do to make you the easiest place to buy from.

Have a great day!