Starbucks did not invent the coffeehouse. It only appears that way.

The 44-year-old retailer and cultural touchstone that turned ordering a latte into a social statement grew fastest between 1987 and 2007, when it averaged two new stores daily. Then the Great Recession hit, people started cutting cappuccinos from their budgets as a first line of fiscal defense, and the Starbucks mermaid logo seemed destined to sink down to where other mermaids live.

But a funny thing happened: it didn’t. In fact, during fiscal 2015, Starbucks expanded by 7 percent in the United States, and global revenue surged 17 percent to $19.2 billion.

So, what happened?

According to a recent article in ZDNet, the green mermaid kept swimming due to its commitment to digital transformation.

“By anticipating and beginning to invest many years ahead of the mobile technology curve, Starbucks today is defining … mobile and retail experiences of the future,” Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz said during the company’s fourth-quarter earnings conference call.

ZDNet reviewed Starbucks’ recent transformation efforts and compiled a brief list of key takeaways every company should consider in their own digital transformations. Among them:

A customer-first mentality – For example, Starbucks raised its sales velocity by introducing Mobile Order and Pay, which allows customers to place orders in advance and pick them up at a nearby store, thus avoiding lines at the counter.

Devotion to one-to-one marketing – Before Starbucks went mobile, it had a loyalty program allowing the company to remember customers’ favorite orders. By merging the program with the mobile app, Starbucks laid the foundation for an omnichannel approach that helps the company know almost as much about their customers as Facebook and Google do.

Never understating tranformation’s cost – Starbucks realized there is no low-cost, quick-fix alternative to an effective, value-added digital transformation. The company invested $145 million in 2015 on technology upgrades and expects to spend an additional $250 million to $275 million next year, emphasizing at the same time to all departments that they still must hit their budgets quarterly and annually.

“The technology innovations we are introducing are further strengthening our brand, improving our efficiency and in-store execution, increasing our profitability, enabling us to further extend our lead over competitors and, most importantly, enabling us to deliver an elevated Starbucks experience to our customers,” Schultz said.

That is how mermaids go from fantasy to reality, and stay there.

Take a guess: How many virtual communities exist online, right now?
The answer is complex. If you count only those sites with 100 million members or more, the list is about a dozen names long. If you count those considered “major” and “active” at the same time, the list has about 400 members.
But if you try counting every community, right down to the tiny sites serving only a few devotees or the sites with barely any attention paid to them, expect to spend days, maybe even weeks just counting.
Now, apparently, major media companies are assigning someone to do exactly that. The latest trend in media administration incorporates a role called “platform ambassador,” or something similar. Simply put, these ambassadors determine which new or existing social platforms are worth bringing aboard as partners.
Their choices are crucial: Media outlets realize (or most do, anyway) that they need to go where potential audiences are, instead of expecting audiences to come find them – an expectation the oldest outlets embraced for 80 years. For example, Facebook and Twitter together garner 1.8 billion users among their active accounts, and of those users more than half get their news directly through the two platforms instead of through traditional media outlets.
Furthermore, each platform has a unique and evolving demographic, so the kinds of information social networkers seek is constantly in flux.
“We need to have a fairly regular view of partnerships and examine any new entrants on the scene and whether we need to make any moves onto those platforms,” said Julian March, senior vice president of digital at NBC News, in an interview with Digiday. “Our success as publishers will be governed as much by our success off platform as on platform.”
Putting someone in charge of platform management also reduces confusion over who should take the lead when a new platform in the marketplace shows promise.
Mind you, these are not people who tweet and hit the “Like” button all day; they are socially savvy individuals who can see past the posts to the underlying value of each platform.
The role “needs to be centralized because you need a point person who knows the status,” Edward Kim, CEO of SimpleReach, a New York-based content management company, told Digiday.
Makes excellent sense, right? More importantly, if you replace the phrase “media outlet” with the name of just about any other industry or company, the logic of having such a position still holds. Virtual communities are sources of actual customers across the digital horizon, and every forward-thinking business today needs to engage those remote, unseen customers to remain viable.
This is why another phrase, “digital transformation,” means so much to the marketplace and gains in importance daily. Companies that drop behind in the race toward digital relevancy and react slowly, or not at all, risk falling too far back to catch up. One of the hurdles in that race is knowing which virtual communities are worth pursuing, to what extent, and for how long.
Nowadays, a platform ambassador – or someone who fills that role – is an essential tool for knocking down those hurdles and clearing a path toward a successful transformation. On this, the media actually may be leading the race.