Starbucks likes holidays and is always ready to dedicate new charity initiatives to the big dates’ celebration. Now the big coffee brand is promoting its Red Love campaign with the help of social and owned media and wants to drive more consumers to the outlets to gain more money for the Red Cross.
The first closest holiday is Thanksgiving Day (this year it’s on November 26 in the USA), the day when people share love with their families and friends. Starbucks wants to share love with its customers as well and approached popular web-sites, like Pandora, NYTimes and Meebo, with a request to help implement the project. The on-line partners are promoting the brand and encouraging the customers to head to the stores and get a free “All You Need Is Love” with tracks from U2, John Legend and the Dave Matthews Band, when spending $15. Starbucks will also donate $1 to fight AIDS in Africa from each purchase of “Red” products, which are also added to the holiday-themed line.
The company is broadly represented on the Facebook social network website and has 5 million friends, who actively participate in the brand’s campaigns. This year Starbucks is hosting a Flickr page where the brand’s customers can upload photos of themselves with their holiday-themed things. For those who love music Starbucks has provided the “Love” CD, which is promoted through a famous Pandora website and its iPhone app.
People who want to express themselves in a creative way and aren’t really involved into the social media can have fun at StarbucksLoveProject. Any one can jump to the site and create a nice digital drawing using different brushes and colors from the red palette. For each of the first 1,000,000 drawings Starbucks will donate 5 cents to Red.