Starbucks

A global platform was meeting increasingly local behavior

G&CO. surveyed global consumers across various markets to understand how Starbucks fit into everyday café behavior. Weekly café visits were already the dominant pattern, while loyalty, personalization, ordering, and the role of the café itself varied meaningfully across markets.

The risk was not simply falling behind on app features. Starbucks was competing with faster-moving digital challengers while planning a customer experience that needed to work across very different markets without losing the consistency of a global brand.

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We didn’t treat localization as the strategy

The standard playbook for a global mobile product is to build the core experience centrally and localize it market by market.

G&CO. approached the problem differently. Rather than assume one global interaction model would translate cleanly, we used regional customer behavior to determine what the experience needed to prioritize in the first place.

Three findings became particularly important: the app could become part of customers’ daily routines, personalization could encourage both loyalty and exploration, and the digital experience needed to reinforce Starbucks’ role as a third place, not reduce the relationship to a transaction.

The objective in our work was rooted to understand where customer behavior genuinely differed, then determine what should remain common across markets.

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We designed one system around the reasons customers return

G&CO. organized the experience around four principles: personalization, simplicity, gifting, and loyalty. Those principles shaped how customers move between discovery, ordering, payment, rewards, pickup, and repeat visits.

We deliberately did not treat loyalty as a rewards feature sitting beside commerce. Personalized recommendations, mobile ordering, rewards, gifting, payment, and store interactions needed to reinforce one another as part of the same customer relationship.

We also avoided creating a different product architecture for every country. The system was designed around a stable core that could accommodate meaningful market variation without fragmenting the Starbucks experience.

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A prototype became a multi-market product system

The work began with an initial prototype and developed through a continuing series of engagements.

G&CO. then extended the Starbucks customer experience, brand system, and UX across global, with subsequent work spanning motion design and market-specific experience variants.

The resulting system connected loyalty, personalization, mobile ordering, rewards, and omnichannel experiences through one coherent design language.

The system kept expanding instead of starting over

The experience became a reusable regional foundation that Starbucks continued extending across international markets through multiple phases of work.

New market requirements and new experience layers could be incorporated into the same system rather than approached as six independent redesigns.

What began as a research-informed customer experience became a foundation for subsequent product decisions, market adaptations, and design work—allowing the system to evolve without repeatedly starting from scratch.

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Frequently asked questions

What did G&CO. do for the Starbucks app redesign?

G&CO. worked with Starbucks on mobile customer experience strategy, consumer research, UX/UI design, loyalty, personalization, mobile ordering, and omnichannel experience design. Research with over a thousand consumers across more than a dozen markets informed an experience system later adapted across six global markets.

How did G&CO. approach loyalty app UX design for Starbucks?

G&CO. treated loyalty as part of the complete customer journey rather than as a standalone rewards feature. Rewards status, personalized recommendations, mobile ordering, gifting, payment, pickup, and repeat visits were designed to reinforce one another inside the same experience.

For Starbucks, effective loyalty app UX design meant making the relationship useful between transactions, not simply making points easier to redeem.

What makes a strong coffee shop loyalty app?

A strong coffee shop loyalty app should give customers reasons to return beyond discounts. Ordering convenience, personalized discovery, rewards, gifting, store experiences, and recognition of existing habits can work together to make the app part of the customer’s routine.

For Starbucks, the opportunity was to make the app useful throughout that relationship rather than only at the moment of purchase.

How did G&CO. rethink Starbucks mobile order and pickup?

G&CO. considered mobile ordering as one part of a larger journey spanning product discovery, personalization, payment, rewards, pickup, and return visits.

That allowed the Starbucks mobile order experience to support convenience without separating ordering from the broader loyalty relationship.

How can personalization strengthen the Starbucks loyalty program?

Personalization can make loyalty more useful by helping customers discover relevant products, offers, rewards, and experiences instead of presenting every customer with the same journey.

For Starbucks, personalization was designed to support both repeat behavior and product exploration, making it an experience principle rather than simply a marketing feature.

What is different about food and beverage app design?

Food and beverage app design connects digital behavior to a highly physical experience. Customers may discover products digitally, order on mobile, visit a store, redeem loyalty benefits, pick up an order, send a gift, and return through a different channel.

The product therefore has to connect commerce, loyalty, physical locations, customer habits, and brand experience rather than optimize a single digital funnel in isolation.

What does digital customer experience strategy mean for a global food and beverage brand?

Digital customer experience strategy determines how customer research, technology, loyalty, commerce, personalization, and physical experiences work together across markets.

For Starbucks, G&CO. used research across 13 markets to establish a common experience model while preserving the flexibility needed for meaningful local differences.

How can food and beverage digital transformation work across multiple markets?

Food and beverage digital transformation does not require every market to use an identical experience. A more scalable approach is to establish the interactions, design principles, and experience architecture that should remain consistent while identifying where local customer behavior requires variation.

G&CO. applied that approach to Starbucks by developing a shared experience system that could be adapted across international boundaries without becoming six unrelated products.