If you are reading this, you probably like to go to a coffee shop to share a moment with family or friends, and certainly you may have the preference to go to a well-known business. Some of you may prefer Starbucks while others may prefer Dunkin’ Donuts or another coffee chain.
Starbucks
Starbucks is known for offering diverse kinds of coffee and tea beverages, and other premium coffee, tea and related products. “Their stores offer a choice of coffee and tea beverages. It includes packaged roasted whole bean and ground coffees, a variety of premium single-serve and ready-to-drink coffee and tea products, juices and bottled water. Starbucks stores also offer an assortment of fresh food and snack offerings (“Starbucks Corporation,” 2019).”
Competitor: Dunkin’ Donuts
One of its main competitors is Dunkin’ Donuts. Starbucks has been in the coffee market a long time while Dunkin’ Donuts, that was always recognized as a donut place, introduced its first specialty coffee line around 2000’s and slowly began to make a name for itself as a destination coffee shop (Hwaley, 2019). While Starbucks has an upscale environment, Dunkin’ Donuts is known for being an all-American brand.
Differentiation between Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts
Let’s analyze each one.
Social media strategies used in Starbucks are to listen attentively to their customers, provide a consistent messages, and handle the communication with its followers. Other characteristics that have helped this brand in its social media strategies are their quality content, their creative captions, to show the human factor in the posts, the product personality and the sense of urgency of buying the products that it evokes when someone sees their diverse social media accounts.
On the other hand, Dunkin’ Donuts not only uses images for posting its latest products, the company also posts offers they may have. Unlike Starbucks, where word-of-mouth has played an important role in the brand, and does not produce many posts in a row, Dunkin’ Donuts prefers to interact more frequently on social media with its followers. Since Starbucks has already earned a name reputation and has a big market share in the coffee market, it doesn’t affect it to not post frequently. Dunkin’ Donuts is also known by people, but it prefers a different approach. Dunkin is more active on social media than Starbucks.
Also, Dunkin works with nano and micro-influencers to promote its products. For example, Dunkin’s influencer marketing campaign featured a variety of influencers with 50,000 followers and below (“Case Study,” 2020).
Starbucks and Dunkin, also differentiate from each other by their brand colors. Starbucks uses green and in some cases like Christmas, it adds red. Dunkin’ Donuts uses purple and orange colors. Posts, logos as well as all types of merchandise will match the respective colors of these brands.
Another differentiation between Starbucks and Dunkin is the global presence. “Starbucks has a much larger global presence than Dunkin, also boasts a larger variety of languages of brand mentions on social media. Although the selection of top languages is largely the same, the shares of non-English mentions of Starbucks are bigger, which only speaks to the brand’s bigger market share overseas (Miashkova, 2020).”
Finally, in relation to gender, an interesting fact is than 52.4% of male and 57.6% female consume Starbucks while 53.9% male and 46.1% consume Dunkin’ Donuts (Miashkova, 2020).
References
Case Study: Dunkin’ Donuts Brews Success with Nano-Influencers (2020). Media Kix.
Retrieved from:
https://mediakix.com/blog/dunkin-donuts-nano-influencer-marketing-case-study-
instagram/
Dunkin’ Donuts (2020). Retrieved from:
Dunkin’ (@dunkin) • Instagram photos and videos
Hwaley, Julia (2019). Who Are Starbucks’ Main Competitors? Investopedia. Retrieved from:
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/101315/who-are-starbucks-main-
competitors.asp
Miashkova, Julia (2020). Starbucks vs. Dunkin’: Which Brand Wins on Social Media?
Retrieved from:
https://awario.com/blog/starbucks-vs-dunkin-donuts-analysis/#user
Starbucks Corporation Company Profile (2019). Marketline. PDF.
Starbucks Instagram (2020). Retrieved from:
Starbucks Coffee ☕ (@starbucks) • Instagram photos and videos
EK Marketing Blog by Ericka Koehler 