Starbucks is one of the most successful brands.

Its strong brand reputation also becomes the

ultimate competitive advantage in the highly competitive coffee and tea market. Starbucks
provides its customers an extraordinary range of experience, such as tasty drink tailor-made
just for you, store atmosphere, and nice conversation with Starbucks’ associates. As a result,
customers emotionally connect with the brand because it repeatedly provides something that
the customers want. This would be a good example of classical conditioning that a good
experience is consistently paired with condition stimulus which brand names. When
customers see Starbucks’ logo, they are confident that they will definitely gain another good
experience and prefer buying Starbucks’ product to other brands. To our minds, it would be
more attractive if Starbucks engage customer’s experience, or unconditional stimuli, with
other conditional stimuli in addition to visual logo. For example, it may use a jingle, a tagline,
or a pattern of conversation by its associates. This will remind customers, even new
customers, of Starbucks when hearing these stimuli.

Ivan Pavlov, a Russian physiologist, was the first to discover the idea of the unconditioned
response. The animals in his experiment, which he used to study the digestive processes of
dogs, started salivating as soon as meat was given to them. When a buzzer was sounded each
time the dogs were fed, according to Pavlov, the animals finally learned to slobber in reaction
to the buzzer alone.
The meat serves as the "unconditioned stimulus" in Pavlov's famous experiment (UCS). The
UCS elicits a reaction naturally and instinctively. The unconditioned response is
demonstrated by the salivation of Pavlov's dogs in reaction to the meat.
By repeatedly pairing a conditioned stimulus (the sound of the buzzer) with the
unconditioned stimulus (the food), the animals eventually came to associate the sound of the
buzzer with the presentation of food. At this point, salivating in response to the sound of the
buzzer became the conditioned response.
In this case, when you get a personalized and custom made drink which is tailor made for
your taste, and a great personalized service(UCS), your UCR will be happiness and feeling
special as this type of service and atmosphere enlightens your mood and makes you feel
better. But when you are presented with the Starbucks logo, a normal person who hasn’t
visited Starbucks or is unfamiliar with their services and drinks will not have any reaction by
looking at the logo. This is because the logo doesn’t make him feel anything as it has no
meaning for him.

Starbucks, a neutral stimulus starts pairing itself with the UCS that is custom tailor made
drinks and great friendly service. Which results in the same UCR as someone would get from
these services and drinks. But people start building a personalized connection with Starbucks
and slowly, they start resonating the Starbucks experience with the UCS and they start to
believe that to get such personalized service and atmosphere, they only need to visit
Starbucks.
After repeatedly seeing the Starbucks logo every time they drink their coffee at Starbucks,
they have now start to feel happy and special looking at the Starbucks logo because they are
so used to seeing the Starbucks logo at the store. Every time they order, the barista will be
wearing the uniform with the Starbucks logo, the way they communicate and make their
coffee, their name on the cup next to the Starbucks logo, all these times when they feel
special or they enjoy the drink or they enjoy the service, the Starbucks logo is always
attached to everything, that when they just look at the logo, they feel the same as if they were
enjoying the coffee, which gives them cravings to visit Starbucks and enjoy.

Conclusion
By offering a pleasurable and relaxing customer experience, Starbucks has been successful in
focusing the customers’ attention on the quality of the experience, the enjoyable memories
that can be woven together in its stores and not on the pricing of its products. Starbucks has
built a really strong brand recognition which sets them apart from all its competitors. Even if
Starbucks decides to charge more for its coffee, still people would prefer to drink it.
Starbucks competitors already offer the same services for cheap but still people prefer to go
the Starbucks because of the brand value that it has. Starbucks has been integrated into
millions of peoples lives that most of them start their day with Starbucks, and even if there is
another coffee shop close to their work place, they would rather put extra effort to visit
Starbucks.