A Study on the Use of Social Media to Understand Consumer Preference: The Case of Starbucks

The paper seeks to identify Starbuck's experience in using social media, understand how social media is linked to customer knowledge management, and assess how social media services could have contributed to Starbucks success. Starbucks demonstrates versatility to engage customers and support different part of customer knowledge management strategy through various social media platforms, such as MyStarbucksIdea, Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare. The paper finds that the emergence of social media has empowered the users because they were able to comment and recommend the firm products more effectively than before. Starbucks closely follows the principle of ‘design with customers’ in defining the role of customers, allowing them to play the role of creators and evaluators of ideas. Taken together, social media has been an effective platform for Starbucks to better understand consumer needs and preferences that eventually bring forth much improvement in Starbucks’ operational performance.