Trending today is @Kingscrown 's acrticle on how Starbucks Wants to Accept Cryptocurrencies - Lets Get STEEM There!. Seeing as I just spent last night sitting at a Starbucks steeming from my laptop, it struck me as a genius idea and one that would have more benefits for both STEEM and Starbucks than I initially thought.
My laptop with the @steemSTEM logo at a local Starbucks in Paris
A social currency is the perfect fit
Social media is the new battleground for companies like Starbucks who not only sell coffee but sell the experience of a social meeting place for people. How many times per day do you think a conversation via SMS or on Facebook messenger ends with "shall we meet at ... for a coffee?". Many! By implementing STEEM, people who have these conversations on a STEEM powered app could be recommended Starbucks as a place where they can go and use the currency powering the application they are using.
Furthermore, as STEEM continues to grow, companies will naturally want to be seen by people using the new social media apps, including STEEM. So being a default option or recommendation will give a competitive advantage to any restaurant or café that makes it convenient to the users.
On top of that, STEEM will enable many cool ways to integrate payments with a social media. Similar to how the Chinese mega-app WeChat allows users to make online purchases directly from an image of a product, implementing STEEM could provide a convenient way for people planning a meeting to do everything from the app.
The marketing value
If you've just paid for your Starbucks coffee with STEEM, are you more likely to take a picture of you being there and sharing it with the community than if you paid with fiat? Of course you are. Just looking at Instagram, you can see that users are already sharing millions of images from their visits to Starbucks.
Searching for "starbucks" on Instagram already shows that tens of millions of people use #starbucks and #starbuckscoffee, as well as numerous country-specific tags
A Starbucks-pay app offering customers to pay with STEEM or SBDs could even add a feature in the app that gives the user the option to "tell your friends you're at Starbucks", or "upload an image using #starbucks and get 10% discount on a brownie!".
They could also build new business models with STEEM to gain more revenue
By requiring the image to be shared from Starbuck's own app to give a STEEM discount, they could put themselves as beneficiaries and thus earn also on people sharing pictures from their stores. A win-win as they get more marketing, sell more coffee and earn a passive income on people's media.
Other business models could surely be applied as well.
So YES! Let's show Starbucks how attractive STEEM can be!
I would also like to encourage everyone to go to https://ideas.starbucks.com and submit that they would LOVE for Starbucks to add STEEM and Steem Dollar payment options! Just do it!
Then maybe when we go to Starbucks in the future we can look back at what we did together today and know that it was thanks to us that we now get to use our favorite crypto to pay for our coffee, and taking the value of STEEM to the Moon at the same time.
Please let me know if you have other ideas for how Starbucks could benefit you and also win themselves by using STEEM. We really could use a strong pitch-deck that we can fire away at companies like them going forward to force them to look into STEEM more closely.
