Starbucks has an idea

What a great brand marketing move. Create a separate web property, invite users (including their own staff) to suggest ways to improve the customer experience (essentially a topic specific social network), and facilitate the group-think by letting those that visit vote up or down the ideas that are suggested. Howard Shultz, you are lucky to have the people you have working for you. Suggestions range from things like loyalty (in a variety and multitude of executions from punch cards and stamps, to web-enabled Starbucks cards that pre-load drink preference AND dollars and transmit this upon ordering), changes to decor, suggestions on service (like nametags for baristas, or express line-ups for drip coffee), and a wide range of other ideas (like free wifi, free refills, and other consumer friendly thoughts). That's what this site is all about anyway, so it's not surprising that there are thousands of ideas. So what do they do with these? They actually implement the best ones, and evaluate everything against their business objectives. There's a blog with seemingly real personalities speaking directly to the idea submitters, and they seem really genuine about what they're doing. So what do I think is the genius part here? The marketing dept. at Starbucks now has a limitless supply of actionable items that they KNOW their customers and employees want, and they only have to evaluate and execute. Sometimes the hardest part of innovation is the brainstorming and testing. It's also extremely costly to test things like operational changes and creative changes without experiencing a stakeholder backlash. The whole system is branded Starbucks, but is actually a 'Software as a Service' hosted solution from Salesforce.com. I love it.