First, Starbucks Odyssey is additive, not substitutive. Starbucks’ current reward program is arguably the most successful loyalty program in the world, with nearly 60 million rewards customers globally and 30 million in the U.S. alone. The loyalty program drives approximately 50% of all Starbucks revenue through incentivizing repeat business, upselling, and customer personalization. It would be quite a leap of faith for Starbucks to discard its wildly successful traditional rewards program and replace it with a Web3-based program, given the newness of the technology and the uncertain success of an NFT-based program. By making Starbucks Odyssey an optional, additional rewards program the firm is able to build on the existing program with complementary products, yet minimize risk to the cash cow, allowing for greater flexibility in the future should the dynamics around Web3 technology change.
