Comms Lens: Behind the Starbucks CEO News
Company leadership gets very close with its communications team whenever a C-Suite departure is on the horizon, and for good reason! Moments like these can either instill confidence or panic depending on how they’re messaged and how those messages are received.
Corporate communications teams thrive when we’re under the microscope. Let’s take a peek into what these teams are up to going into and during these moments:
Defining One Key Message: Your corporate communications team will normally work up a 1-2 page key message toolkit, from which everything else is pulled from (see #3 below for where and how it’s deployed). This normally sits with the C-Suite for review and in Starbucks’ case, I’m guessing it went to their Board of Directors for edits. Not many people see this document — senior executives would receive in its transformed state as an FAQ document.
It’s Always About the Future: This is not the time to look back on what went wrong, we’re pointing our boats forward people! Maybe we acknowledge a “history of excellence and constant innovation” but we are mostly setting a blank canvas that our audiences can fill with their own imaginations. “This will be even better when we fix _____ and invest in new thing ______!”
One Plan & Why Timing is Critical: This is when the communications team transitions from writing mode and switches to important logistics mode. Let’s boil it down to four key components that are normal parts of a communications plan for moments like these:
Press Release: Scheduled for early in the morning (7 or 7:30 am — definitely before markets open in Starbucks’ case) that is distributed over the wire and posted to their website. While a handful of media interviews would already be scheduled under embargo (topic for another day?), the press release does the heavy lifting for external communications.
SEC Filings: As a publicly traded company within the United States, Starbucks would have to file an SEC form called an 8-K. This ‘normally’ precedes the press release going out by 5-10 minutes and is handled by the Investor Relations team.
All Employee Announcement: IR told us it’s okay to send the press release, we see it online and on your website, and we grab the URL for the employee communications note. This would be sent to all employees and frequently would invite everyone to a virtual/physical town hall to see and hear from the new CEO directly.
Social Media: Your comms team would identify part of a quote they like most (either from the press release or all employee note) and work with the social media team to create a JPEG that’s posted to LinkedIn, Twitter, and anywhere else that makes sense. We get even more “logistic-y” here, as before the CEO starts their role, we ask them for a recent headshot for use cases like this.
External communications, internal communications, investor communications, and social communications are the mainstays for moments like these. Messaging lays the foundation from which these deliverables are built, and after everything above is in play, a lot more happens!
Starbucks’ stock rose by 25% (Axios) the day they announced a new CEO — comms team mission accomplished right? My math here is simple: Numbers x Story = Stock Price.
Okay, off of my soapbox, tell me what you think!
