Starbucks' 22 Year Neuroscience Experiment Continues – CoffeeTalk

Starbucks has been working on a secret weapon for 22 years, the Pumpkin Spice Latte (PSL), which is returning to the Starbucks drink menu for the 22nd year in a row. The idea began 22 years ago when a group of Starbucks employees gathered in the Liquid Lab on the seventh floor of Starbucks headquarters and started testing ideas. The goal was to develop a “fall-flavored” beverage that might become a seasonal favorite.

Pumpkin Spice Latte (PSL) has now brought in an estimated $500 million a year, which is slightly shy of half of the total annual revenue of other entire quick service restaurant chains. It also dwarfs sales of other Starbucks seasonal offerings, like the Eggnog Latte and Peppermint Mocha. Additionally, foot traffic and same-store sales get a nice, big, reliable boost on the first PSL day; last year, the first day of PSL sales, which was a Thursday, saw a 24 percent jump in traffic over typical Thursdays, according to Placer.ai.

According to Peter Dukes, nobody on the team that came up with the Pumpkin Spice Latte idea would have expected that it would still be around today. One of the main factors in its survival was the rise of social media, which had not really been a thing yet at scale when Starbucks first introduced the drink. After Facebook opened access to anyone (originally, it was only college students), and after Twitter took off, PSL became an early viral media success story.

One theory is that even though pumpkin spice is a 21st-century flavor, it evokes nostalgic emotional connections to American traditions like family get-togethers and Thanksgiving dinner — even as relationships have become more fragmented. Neuroscientist Catherine Franssen suggested that pumpkin spice has the ability to reach into the center of our memories at a very emotional level. Sarah Cormiea, a postdoctoral researcher in the neurology department at the University of Pennsylvania, had a complementary take in another interview:

Information about smells skips the thalamus and goes straight to the cortex. This gives odors in our environment (and in the foods we eat) a sort of direct access to higher-level processing areas in the brain. So, if you have a lot of nostalgia for the fall season, then a smell strongly related to fall with a familiar name like PSL would probably work really well to stimulate all those warm, fuzzy feelings.

What’s also interesting for business owners besides how to trigger neuroscientific reactions with nostalgia might be how Starbucks has spent every one of the past 22 years iterating, improving, and maybe even perfecting the PSL product. In short, the PSL that customers get at Starbucks this year will be very different from the one that Starbucks launched back in 2003 (and expanded nationwide in 2004).

Read More @ Inc.