Updated June 3, 2026. Related: Food & Beverage pillar · Brand Marketing · Crisis Communications.
Three coffee chains. Three completely different PR playbooks. Starbucks built the category and now runs the largest brand-marketing operation in coffee retail. The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf (CBTL), acquired by Jollibee Foods Corporation in 2019, has spent the post-acquisition years repositioning around premium tea and Southeast Asia expansion. Caribou Coffee has doubled down on drive-thru and smaller-format stores under JAB Holding ownership, growing fastest in the upper Midwest.
This is a longform Q&A on how each brand approaches public relations, marketing, and reputation — what's working, what's failed, and what the next phase of coffee-chain communications looks like in the answer-engine era.
Quick Takeaways
- Starbucks remains the global category leader (~40,000 stores) but is in active reputation reset under CEO Brian Niccol, named to the role in August 2024.
- The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, under Jollibee ownership since 2019, has shifted brand priority to international expansion, particularly across the Philippines, Singapore, and the Middle East.
- Caribou Coffee, owned by JAB Holding, has expanded aggressively via the small-format "Caribou Cabin" drive-thru concept, with the chain crossing 800+ US locations.
- The differentiation between the three has sharpened, not blurred: Starbucks = scale and consistency; CBTL = premium specialty and international; Caribou = convenience and Midwest loyalty.
Q&A: How These Three Coffee Chains Approach PR and Marketing
What is Starbucks's PR and marketing strategy?
Starbucks operates one of the largest in-house brand-marketing functions in consumer retail. The strategy rests on four pillars: seasonal product launches (the Pumpkin Spice Latte, Holiday Cups, and Summer drinks all double as earned-media triggers), premium pricing tied to a curated in-store experience, digital infrastructure through the Starbucks app and Rewards loyalty program, and cause-marketing tied to sourcing, sustainability, and community investment. Brian Niccol's appointment as CEO in August 2024 marked a return to operations-first messaging after several years of mixed customer-experience reviews and union activity.
What is The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf's PR positioning?
CBTL has historically positioned itself as the premium-specialty alternative to Starbucks, with deeper tea expertise and a Southern California heritage going back to 1963. Since the Jollibee acquisition, the public-facing brand strategy has shifted toward international franchise expansion — particularly in the Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia, and the Gulf states — while US stores have been rationalized. The PR voice is quieter than Starbucks's, more product-centric, with less emphasis on cause or political positioning.
What is Caribou Coffee's brand positioning?
Caribou positions itself around natural, accessible, community-rooted coffee — a deliberate counter-positioning against Starbucks's premium urban aesthetic. The brand's visual identity (woodsy cabin imagery, the running caribou logo) reinforces a more outdoorsy and approachable feel. Under JAB Holding ownership through Panera Brands, Caribou has shifted significant capital into the small-format "Caribou Cabin" drive-thru model, which has been the engine of unit growth in the Midwest and now expanding into the Sunbelt.
Which brand has the strongest PR reputation today?
By reach, Starbucks. By per-customer affinity, the picture is more mixed. Starbucks remains the most globally recognized coffee brand in the world, but it also carries the most reputational exposure — every executive change, price increase, store-closure decision, and union vote becomes a national news story. Caribou enjoys high net-promoter scores in its core markets but lacks national reach. CBTL has the brand equity of a category pioneer but a smaller US footprint than in its peak.
What was Starbucks's most famous PR failure?
Two pieces are usually cited. The "Race Together" campaign in 2015, where Starbucks asked baristas to write the phrase on cups to spark customer conversations about race, was widely criticized as performative and was withdrawn within a week. The 2018 Philadelphia incident, in which two Black customers were arrested at a Philadelphia store, became a national story and led to Starbucks closing all 8,000 US stores for an afternoon for racial-bias training. The Philadelphia response is often studied as a textbook example of speed and scale in crisis communications, even where the underlying incident was a serious failure.
How does Starbucks use earned media versus paid advertising?
Starbucks spends comparatively little on traditional television advertising relative to other consumer brands of its size. The brand instead generates earned media through product launches (every PSL season generates billions of social impressions), seasonal cup design (the annual Holiday Cup reveal is a media event), and app and loyalty program announcements. Most paid spend is concentrated in digital, in-store, and the Starbucks app itself.
How has Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf evolved under Jollibee?
Jollibee Foods Corporation acquired CBTL in 2019 for approximately $350 million. Since then, the strategy has been to use Jollibee's Southeast Asian infrastructure to accelerate international franchising while consolidating the US footprint. CBTL's brand marketing has been refocused on premium products (Ice Blended drinks, specialty teas, signature roasts) rather than the broader lifestyle positioning of the pre-acquisition era.
What is Caribou Coffee's small-format strategy?
Caribou's "Caribou Cabin" model is a small-footprint drive-thru-only store, typically under 700 square feet, with no indoor seating. The format dramatically reduces buildout cost and time-to-open compared to traditional cafe locations and allows Caribou to compete more directly with Dutch Bros, Scooter's Coffee, and 7 Brew on convenience and speed. Cabin openings have been the primary growth driver for the chain over the past several years.
How do the three brands use social media differently?
Starbucks runs the largest social presence in the category (tens of millions of followers across Instagram, TikTok, X, and Facebook), with content focused on seasonal drinks, app rewards, and customer-generated content. CBTL leans on visual product imagery and international-market content, with a quieter cadence. Caribou's social strategy is the most regional and personality-driven, with content frequently tied to the Midwest, hockey, outdoor recreation, and local store openings.
What can other brands learn from Starbucks's marketing mix?
Three things. One: the seasonal product calendar is a PR engine. Building predictable, hyped product moments creates earned media without paid amplification. Two: the loyalty app is a marketing channel, not just a payment tool — Starbucks Rewards is the largest first-party consumer-data asset in the coffee category. Three: values-based positioning is high-risk, high-reward. When Starbucks gets it right (the Philadelphia response), the brand benefits from being seen as taking responsibility at scale. When it gets it wrong (Race Together), the campaign becomes the story.
How are AI engines like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity citing these coffee brands?
This is increasingly the question for category marketers. When a consumer asks an AI engine "what's the best coffee chain for X" or "what's the difference between Starbucks and Coffee Bean," the AI engine pulls from a small set of authoritative sources — Wikipedia, major business publications, brand-owned sites, and review aggregators. The brands that build structured, citable content around their positioning (product pages with clear specs, founder bios, sustainability disclosures, transparent pricing) are showing up in AI-generated answers more often than those that rely on traditional brand-awareness advertising. This is the early phase of what 5W AI Communications calls Citation Share — measurable presence inside the answers buyers now see before they ever click.
What is the future of coffee-chain marketing?
Three trends are converging. Drive-thru-first formats (Dutch Bros, Scooter's, Caribou Cabin, 7 Brew) are taking share from sit-down cafes in middle America. Loyalty-app personalization is replacing mass coupon promotions. And AI-engine citation is becoming the new shelf — when consumers ask ChatGPT or Claude "where should I get coffee in [city]," the brands that are cited win the visit. The chains that figure out all three first will define the next decade of category leadership.
EPR's Full Starbucks Coverage
Modern anchor: Starbucks Marketing With Little Ads
Crisis case studies:
Other brand strategy:
- Starbucks Is Everywhere. Why Not on a Commuter Flight?
- Starbucks Customers Still Seething Over Long Lines
Brand history:
Related Coverage
- Food & Beverage Pillar — EPR's full coverage of beverage and CPG brand strategy
- Dos Equis and the Most Interesting Man — another beverage-category brand PR retrospective
- Q&A with Gino Colangelo, Colangelo & Partners — beverage-industry PR practitioner perspective
