Starbucks Singapore had been losing ground to boycotts, high prices, and premium home machines. The brief was experiential — but the real work was finding which young professional we were trying to bring back, and what they actually wanted out of a coffee event.
Starbucks Singapore was facing a fourth consecutive quarter of profit decline — driven by boycotts, high drink prices, and the rise of premium home coffee machines. The brief was to design a multi-sensory experiential campaign that would deepen emotional connection with young professionals while reinforcing Starbucks' premium brand identity.
I led the company analysis. A SWOT exercise pointed to a clearer diagnosis than the brief had: the brand's strengths (customisation, the "third place" atmosphere) were being undercut by long wait times and overwhelming menus, and the community-coffeehouse identity wasn't being reinforced anywhere in the digital experience.
The campaign had to do two things at once — fix a digital absence in the short term, and earn back a category position long term.
I built Felicia Tay — a 25-year-old marketing executive, middle-to-upper income, living in the city. I covered habits, values, preferences, needs, and pain points, and tested every concept decision against her.
The persona work shaped every downstream choice. The "exclusive mug for completing all stamps" reward came directly from a persona finding: this segment values tangible takeaways and exclusive merchandise more than discounts.
My partner and I built Bean There, Met You — a two-day Valentine's weekend event (14–15 February 2026) at PLQ Plaza, structured around five interconnected stations and a stamp rally.
Complete all four core stations and you earned an exclusive Starbucks mug — a deliberately scarce, deliberately shareable object designed to do the social media work after the event was over.
A two-day event engineered to keep working after it ended — the earn-it mug designed to do the social work once everyone went home.
Sell 1,060 tickets, 480 specialty coffee bags, 50 brewing equipment sets. Net profit ≥ SGD 5,300. CSAT ≥ 85%, average 45-min dwell time. Long-term targets: 15% Q1 sales uplift, NPS shift from 30 to 45.
If I ran it again → I'd prototype the five-station flow on-site first — the 45-minute dwell target only holds if the queue between stations never does.
05Social Rollout
I designed the social collaterals: event promotion posts, captions, and the rollout plan for Instagram and TikTok. We used a nano-influencer engagement strategy — small audiences, high trust — to drive FOMO without burning the influencer budget on reach we couldn't activate.