Starbucks’s new Secret Menu is a perfect strategy to tap TikTok

Starbucks has been in a bit of a slump, facing stagnant growth as it awaits its new CEO Brian Niccol’s turnaround. His strategy? Nicer stores you want to sit in. Protein-loaded coffee. And now . . . turning every day at Starbucks into a viral drop.

The company is launching a “secret menu” in its app today, building off the momentum of its “not-so-secret menu” broadcast channel on Instagram. Secret menus, of course, are irresistible to the fleshy consumer brain. A mystery and treat in one! But in the case of Starbucks, it’s part of a brilliant promotional strategy by its new chief brand officer Tressie Lieberman.

How will Starbucks’s Secret Menu work?

The menu will contain rotating offers for drinks. But instead of being born inside its Seattle headquarters coffee lab, these drinks are created by fans on social media who use Starbucks’s customization options to create particularly alluring beverages.

“That’s what people do today: create their own Starbucks order,” says Lieberman. “And so how do we tap into that?”

Indeed, customization is a big part of Starbucks’s appeal; you can order a drink just as you like it. But its menu has become so sprawling and complicated for baristas to produce that Niccol has actually cut it back by nearly a third to simplify production.

What’s brilliant about the Starbucks Secret Menu—which is launching with a $25,000 prize to stoke interest—is twofold: Instead of creating a TikTok trend, it can simply ride a TikTok trend, since people are already promoting their own custom drinks on the service. But the second component is just as important for a company with tens of thousands of locations worldwide. These glitzy, viral drinks are being made with the ingredients Starbucks already has lying around. In other words, it’s all turnkey. Starbucks doesn’t need to spin up a whole production supply chain to sell the equivalent of a McRib. It can just rearrange its food stuffs to make something novel, a lot like Taco Bell combines its shells and sauces to make something new—but crowdsourced.

This strategy is a far cry from how Starbucks used to look at viral creations: as operational headaches that were at odds with its own business model. Instead, Starbucks can analyze a viral menu item, decide if it needs to be tweaked for scale, and then share it back with its audience in a way that can work.

“Some of the best ideas are coming from customers. Customers decide what’s in; customers decide what’s cool,” says Lieberman. “ We’re really just working to help put media behind and get more reach around new ideas. It’s a lot about being visible, visible to our audience, and being really strategic about how we approach these different trends as well,” says Lieberman.

She points to a recent viral drink called the Gummy Shark, where TikTokers took the Summer Berry Refresher and added cold foam so it would taste like the popular candy, as a recent proof point of this strategy.

“That’s a gift from our customers,” says Lieberman. “Let’s jump on that. Let’s create content around it and celebrate it, instead of moving away from it.”

In other words, with its new Secret Menu, Starbucks is building a workflow so that they don’t need to come up with their next hit, while ensuring that you can taste the wild thing you’re gawking at online easily. (Its new point-of-sale terminals will even be getting a viral drinks tab so that if you walk into a store without your phone, you can order off this menu as well.)

The only question remaining is, can a secret menu stay cool when it’s available to millions of customers? Anyone who’s ordered a speak-easy-inspired Neapolitan shake or animal style fries from In-N-Out knows . . . the answer is a sad and true, “absolutely yes.”