How has Starbucks come to dominate the retail coffee industry and also emerged as an icon in millions of people’s daily lives? It is their product? Not at all; many people prefer other brands but remain loyal Starbucks customers. Is it the location? No, because although Starbucks generally has great locations, so do many of their competitors. Is it their facilities or equipment? No, those have also been duplicated by competitors. What the competition can’t seem to duplicate is the way Starbucks captures the emotional capital of their customers, by what I call the ‘Starbucks difference’. At nearly all Starbucks, you can expect the same ambience and atmosphere, the same product quality and the most important, the same way of engaging the customer. Starbucks associates are trained to greet customers in a very friendly and courteous way, with a smile, to remember regulars and treat them as such. They find a way to incorporate the customer’s name into the order; they even greet regulars by their drink order instead of their name, and people love it. Those few things create the ‘Starbucks difference’ and have produced a long-term cult following unlike anything I have ever seen. While this is a very simple strategy, very few companies come close to doing any of this.

Starbucks’ President, Howard Schultz, pointed out in his book, Pour your Heart into It, Starbucks is today’s ‘third place’ for people, a place away from work and home where they can safely connect with others area, a coworkers asks that employee: ‘Have you seen Beth’s new haircut?’ Because the salon doesn’t have an employee named Beth, it is a polite way to make the employee aware that she may want to change the topic of conversation.

What does Starbucks really sell? Places like Starbucks and Seattle’s Best Coffee aren’t selling an expensive cup of coffee; they are selling really inexpensive rent. Think