Starbucks Assignment, Research Paper Example

Starbucks is a multinational coffee house that has been dominant in the beverage industry for as a coffee house dealing in roast coffee beans. Even though the company initially started on strictly coffee business, it expanded this to cover tea as well. One of the company’s strategies in market approach is the target of high visibility locations that are characterized by high traffic.

The value proposition of the company encompasses aspects like the Starbucks’ branding strategy that incorporates creation of an experience round the coffee consumption as an aspect of customer experience and then keeping the coffee culture alive. For this reason, the value proposition of Starbucks comprises three basic components. These include provision of highest quality to the market, proper atmosphere for provision of this high quality coffee and then good quality service delivery.

Good quality service delivery supersedes the notion that customer service is strictly a function of how a company looks to the customers or potential customers and being friendly thereafter. It is actually a function of how the company is able to exceed the expectations of the customer, not just constantly but regularly as well. The overview of Starbucks on this issue can be evaluated on the backdrop of a few concepts about the company and its customer service. First of all, the company complies with the Hazard analysis critical control point (HACCP) that ensures a sustained cohesive, encouraging and clean work environment.

Starbucks Mission Statement

The mission statement of the Starbucks Company can be viewed as comprising two main components. The first component is “to inspire and nurture the human spirit – one person one cup and one neighborhood at a time.” The tenets brought out in the statement are expressed in several ways by the company. From the start, the company lays a lot of emphasis on quality of the coffee products it provides to the market and thus it ensures the raw coffee products are ethically sourced to ensure that this ethical code is not broken at all. In addition, the company stresses that those it carries out business with are partners hence providing a base for achievement of common objective. Employees are treated as partners hence view the business as a passion rather than a job or employment.

The second component of the company’s mission statement concerns the environment in which the company operates. To this end of environmental awareness, the company’s mission is to play a role of environmental leadership in its entire business dealings. According to the information available on the company’s website, Starbucks achieves this mission in several ways. It has instilled environmental responsibility as an integral part of the corporate value and it ensures measuring and monitoring of the progress of its environmental projects (Starbucks 2010). It also encourages development of innovative solutions that are flexible to bring about change.

Strategic Management Factors

Starbucks has had to deal with a number of problems to ensure its standing in the market is not deteriorated. The first problem is reputation management. When Starbucks entered the Middle East market, it had to deal with a culture clash that produced a mixture of signals from the market hence challenging its reputation. It was serious that it had to change its logo to fit in the Islamic market. When the company entered the Saudi market in 2000, it had to alter its logo by removing the mermaid so that the products would find acceptance in the market (Austin & Reaves 2003).

The biggest challenge is to maintain a sustained reputation through customer service. Discovering that customer behavior is diverse is very important to knowing that reputation management through customer service is a challenge that the company has tried to deal with. Lastly, competitive force in the international coffee industry has provided the company with a challenge that made it to close at least 800 outside the US.

Competitive Advantages of the Company in the Pathway of Going International

One of the factors that contribute to the Starbucks competitive advantage is the long standing history of market performance and presence. This has given the company a great opportunity to show its coverage globally and become a formidable force in the coffee house industry. Even though the company has been in the market since 1971, it has actually grown very fast to capture a competing edge in the global coffee business.

Another factor that places the company at a competing edge against other competitors is the fact that Starbucks encourages sustained generation of novel ideas that leads to new products and creation of new experiences for its customers. For instance, the designs for commuter mugs are given special priority to ensure that they provide the customer with desired experience. As such, designers and artists are contracted to carry out the job of coming up with designs for these mugs (Thompson & Strickland 2007). Product differentiation is one of the creative means Starbucks uses to create satisfaction for different customers and gain competitive advantage in the coffee house industry. Product differentiation comes in ways like the offering of different coffee flavors to the consumers.

When Starbucks started as a small coffee shop way back in 1971 situated in Seattle it was not evident that it would later become a global mark in the coffee industry. Currently, the company operates in 49 countries with over 17,800 stores in these countries (Mitchell 2003). The US has the largest number of stores of all the countries it operates. Rapid growth strategy adopted by the company in the 90s gave it a strong competitive advantage.

Reference List:

Starbucks (2010) Mission Statement: Starbucks Coffee Company. Retrieved Wednesday, November 03, 2010 from URL:  http://www.starbucks.com/about-us/companyinformation/mission-statement

Austin J. E, & Reaves C (2003) Starbucks and conservation international: New York: McGraw-Hill.

Mitchell D (2003) The ultimate competitive advantage of continuing business model innovation Journal of Business Strategy,

Thompson A., A, & Strickland A J (2007) Crafting and executing strategy Retrieved online on Wednesday, November 03, 2010 from source URL: http://www.gbv.de/dms/zbw/588981982.pdf