Starbucks Case

Introduction

Coming to the social media, Starbucks makes a really virtuous use of the social media as its marketing strategy. The first and foremost thing they did was to offer free Wi-Fi to its customers. When anyone talks about social media, Facebook, instagram comes in mind. So therefore, in 2008, Starbucks made their Facebook page and they have around more than 35million who have liked the page.

On Instagram, they have more than 7 million people who follow their page. So they use these two platforms for the people who want to engage with them. Coming to tweeter, Starbucks regularly connects with their customers by responding to their tweets and if there are any (DSIM, 2016)Service performance leads to measurement of success.

As we all know that if you need to keep your customers then first you need to keep your employees happy. For Starbucks to keep maintain their success and the reputation of the brand they needed to measure the performance of the service properly. Starbucks made a mystery consumer tool referred as the Customer Snapshot to measure the quality of their service. So the anonymous person used to get a chance to visit the stores almost three times in the time frame of a quarter.

After this process was done, the person used to rate the service; which were - Speed of the service, Cleanliness, Quality of the product and the Service. If the scores of the company’s specific come high then obviously the company is doing well and if it doesn’t then the company needs to look what is going wrong.

Starbucks Reached India

Starbucks tried coming to India in the year 2007 but unfortunately that did not happen. However, Starbucks came to India in the year 2012. It entered the India with the help of the Tata group, as Starbucks India is a joint venture with the Tata global beverages. In India, they opened almost 100 stores across different cities.(381).

As Tata has a lot of experience in the Indian market, they helped Starbucks to grow in India. As they have the TAJ hotels, Tata decided to offer the Starbucks coffee in Taj hotels and thus they also modified the menu of Starbucks in India. (Bharee, 2012). The most important strategy for the success of Starbucks in India was the leverage taken by the company of Tata’s coffee bean farms and their facilities of roasting it. This helped the Starbucks to make a feasible structure, which helped them in competing with the other local coffee stores. (Gopalakrishna, Victor, & Fleishmann, 2016).

As Starbucks knew about the Indians and the Indian market so they decided to introduce their tea brand in 2017 called as Teavana. This helped in expanding their business more and also has an upper hand over their competitors. Starbucks planned a strategy to save the wastage of food. They decided that they will never waste the food which is not being sold rather they will give them to the poor or the needy ones, like this the food sharing strategy of Starbucks came into action.

Discussion

Starbucks as a blue ocean strategy, since the start the motive of Starbucks was to create a new perception for the coffee culture. Starbucks wanted their customers to enjoy the coffee rather than just having it. The first step of the theory is to create a market where there is an unchallenged market and Starbucks has been able to do so. Starbucks were able to attract the customers and also made the non-coffee persons into coffee drinkers.

Starbucks has been a successful brand since a long time; they have created their customer loyalty. According to Starbucks they are not just serving coffee, actually they are selling the atmosphere which attracts the customers to come again and again. As we all know Starbucks has been dominating the coffee market since a long time and despite the market has moving to the red ocean theory, Starbucks has been trying its best to stay on the blue ocean. They adapted the innovative idea of payments done by the mobile phones, so they launched an application for it. This strategy of Starbucks helped them to introduce their loyalty program.

The company gives some reward points to the customers who pay them through the app itself and this helped them to retain their customers and their loyalty with company. Through this application, Starbucks eradicated many issues like the problem when there is no change to give in cash and it also lessened the time people spend in just seeing and deciding what to order.

First of all, I will talk about the five phases of strategic planning i.e.

• Development of company’s mission statement
• Exploring and Evaluating the Environment
• Set the objectives, which you want to achieve
• Make appropriate strategies
• Implementation & Follow up.

When it comes to the mission statement, Starbucks’s main mission is to make their customers go crazy about the coffee culture and then to inspire them by offering the best coffee. They want to stimulate the humans by serving one cup of coffee to one human in one area each time. The mission statement also focuses on their strategies of expanding their business and while they think of expanding they do not demoralize its essential values.

Second, when it comes to exploring and evaluating the environment, Starbucks does a proper deep research of the environment in which they are going to enter. They make sure that they know everything about the market along with the needs and tastes of the customers of that particular domain, so that they can modify and set their menu according to the results they get.