Starbucks plans a ‘global digital community’ around coffee with an NFT loyalty program

Starbucks

Starbucks will add new concepts such as ownership and community-based membership models in the future, according to the coffee company's CEO Howard Shultz and executive vice president and chief marketing officer Brady Brewer.

A post on the company's website explains what that means.

We plan to create a series of branded NFT collections, the ownership of which initiates community membership, and allows for access to exclusive experiences and perks. The themes of these collections will be born of Starbucks artistic expressions, both heritage and newly created, as well as through world-class collaborations with other innovators and like-minded brands.

The plan will be powered by non-fungible token (NFTs) and will roll out as some kind of digital collectible-enhanced loyalty program. Starbucks currently has locations almost everywhere, and an exclusive set of perks is supposed to add to that value.

What are the perks and experiences, and why do they need a technology that can be used to implement them? Your guess is as good as ours, but Starbucks execs are looking at the company's history of being early to roll out mobile payments and wi-fi, and figure things will work in a similar way here with a noticeable addition to its profits. The Wall Street Journal headline read "NFT Sales are Flatlining" on the same day that Starbucks pitched its investors.

For those of you praying that I was kidding, here's the video proof.



In an address today aimed at unionizing workers, multi-billionaire Howard Schultz revealed that Starbucks is going to get into the NFT business "sometime before the end of this calendar year" pic.twitter.com/Jb2rGjgHj4

— Jordan Zakarin (@jordanzakarin) April 5, 2022

During an Open Forum to address employees to admit the company hadn't done enough to support them and promise it will do better for them, Schultz's first NFT pitch came.

He was able to find one person who said they had invested in NFTs, and immediately began explaining how out of all of the many NFT projects, bands, celebrities, and communities that have launched in the last year or so.

The company doesn't know if it will use more than one, but it is certain that whatever approach it does use will be sustainable.

Starbucks doesn't have to do anything except create a simple experience of using a digital wallet that works for its loyalty program members, secure its processes against smart contract flaws or worse, and protect its accounts against relentless phish attacks. They can add digital tchotchkes with a record of ownership to each purchase, assuming that customers and employees want it.