The MorningYes alarm is a digitally innovative way to help make mornings better. Our insight was simple: we all morning differently. Whether you wake up for a 5am run or rise right before noon, mornings belong to all of us. We reset the cultural conversation around “ideal” morning people by showing how anyone can have a great morning by saying yes. Around New Years, we targeted audiences with the intention of becoming morning people with our new alarm to inspire and help them on their journey.

With 75 less morning transactions per store in comparison to the US market, Starbucks wanted to become the best part of someone’s day by helping people love mornings even before the first sip of coffee. As we examined mornings, we realized that alarm clocks dictate our state of minds for the rest of the day with most alarms generating anxiety with a stressful, jarring sound. With stress leading to a handful of diseases and disorders, Starbucks wanted to help create a new waking experience that was fundamentally positive.

Collaborating with a team of neuroscientists, musicians and health experts, Starbucks engineered an upbeat alarm to wake you up feeling better. The alarm starts with a gentle intro that gradually builds to transition the brain from a sleep to an awake state before positive lyrics and upbeat tempos are introduced to release feel-good dopamine to bolster a motivational outlook to your day.

Scientifically, we know that music is relaxing and can reduce our stress level, physiological markers of stress and improve our mood. It makes sense that we should be able to use music to ease ourselves from relaxation, or in this case sleep, to a state of alertness, and help us engage our day with a positive mindset. However, no one has undertaken the task of changing our morning through music until now.

Working with our scientific partners, we prepared a sandbox for our composers to create music to. Through trial and error, we created a song with universal reach, highly adoptable and engineered to improve mornings by setting it as your alarm. It was vital that our song include the correct instruments, tempo, lyrics and structure (gradual build) and only through intelligent sound design and composition was it possible to create a scientifically optimal and positive waking experience.