Date of Award

Fall 12-11-2023

Document Type

Research Paper

Publication Title

Social Media Marketing: Coffee Chains

Department

Whittier Scholars Program

First Advisor

Kristen Smirnov

Abstract

Coffee chains use various marketing strategies on social media to engage their target audience. I specifically examined Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, Starbucks, and Dunkin’ through their content and the number of likes and comments on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook for the year of 2022. I found that Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf uses psychographic segmentation, real time marketing, and seasonal marketing for their content. They focused on targeting users who live in California by posting content that goes along with California’s weather, such as cold drinks even in the winter time. Starbucks posted content that was emotion evoking, action-inducing, and informative to build a connection with their customers online. They posted content on what was trending and consistently interacted with users online. They also used cause branding as their strategy by posting causes they support regularly. Lastly, Dunkin’ used humor, brand collaborations, and crowd culture as their marketing strategy. They posted humorous memes and captions, and a majority of their content was about iced coffee. From them using direct words in their posts, their target audience was millennials and Generation Z. Based on analyzing likes and comments for each brand on all three platforms in 2022, Instagram was the most popular social media among them. It is important to note that in early 2022, Elon Musk began acquiring Twitter and this brought some turmoil to the platform due to policy changes (Wile 2022). This may have impacted how users interacted with the brands.

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