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Does Starbucks new free Wi-Fi offer really raise the loyalty bar?

June 15, 2010 by Sharon Goldman — Senior Director, COLLOQUY

No one who loves Starbucks doesn’t love the fact that they’re now offering free Wi-Fi in its over 6500 locations, right? My question is: How much will this move truly move the Seattle-based needle when it comes to customer loyalty?

After all, one of the reasons Starbucks is suddenly going the free Wi-Fi route (instead of getting Wi-Fi through a loyalty card) is that they’re in a stiff coffee competition with other chains such as McDonald’s, which has been offering Starbucks-like lattes for some time and already has free Wi-Fi in its locations.

So, Starbucks is really just evening the playing field. In addition, they’re adding a proprietary content network called the Starbucks Digital Network, through a partnership with Yahoo. They say it’ll offer unique local content not available anywhere else — but users must log in with a unique identifier, so the company will be gathering new data — possibly a good omen for a new data-driven understanding of customers? Free Wi-Fi is essential, of course, for this new model to work.

Still, overall, this move mostly seems like a simple must-have on Starbucks’ part — after all, more and more people expect free Wi-Fi wherever they go and if the competition’s already offering it, they have to stay in the game.

To my mind, this doesn’t seem like it will be a true loyalty game-changer…but hey, I don’t really drink much coffee, so what do I know? Let me know what *you* think about Starbucks latest customer offering. Does it take loyalty from tall to grande?