Starbucks Corporation

1. Introduction

Starbucks Corporation is the largest American global coffeehouse company in the world where it is located at Seattle, Washington. On March 30, 1971, three students of University of San Francisco decided to open the first Starbucks in Seattle, namely a history teacher, Zev Siegl; a writer, Gordon Bowker; and an English teacher, Jerry Baldwin. By 1987, Starbucks was sold to Howard Schultz and Starbucks’ business and started to boom. Starbucks had expanded up to 140 outlets throughout America in 1992. Starbucks planned to expand its market outside of America and they opened a Starbucks chain in Japan in 1996. The Statistics Portal (2014) had reported Starbucks had totalling up to 21 366 stores by the end of the fiscal year. In 2014, Starbucks has become the second most well-known fast food chain in the world behind McDonald’s. Forbes (2014) had stated Starbucks is the 61st most valuable brand in the whole wide world.

Starbucks is a coffeehouse that sells hot and cold beverages, microground instant coffee, whole bean coffee and full leaf teas, cakes and cookies. Pre-packaged food items and non-food items such as tumblers and mugs also sold by Starbucks. Besides, various beers, wines and appetizers can be found at Starbucks Evenings after 4pm. Starbucks also offers books, films and music through Starbucks Entertainment division and Hear Music.

In Malaysia, Starbucks established a joint-venture with Berjaya Starbucks Coffee Company Sdn. Bhd. They launched the first coffeehouse chain on 17 December 1998 and had already opened up to 140 stores by January 2012. Starbucks provide various training and development program to groom them into great baristas that can provide great coffee and top quality customer service. Hence, Starbucks is one of the leader of specialty coffee company today and helped to set a benchmark in the F & B industry in Malaysia. Starbucks, a customer-oriented company that had invested great amount of time and money into utilizing customer relationship management (CRM) programs and technology that work well to gain and retain their market share (Starbucks, n.d.).

1. Content

2.1.0Customer acquisition

   2.1.1 Quality of product

  Starbuck offers high quality product to acquire and attract new customer around the world. The coffee beans they planted are able to provide customers with delicious coffee. Starbucks provide customers and attract new customers with not only the quality of product, and also the varietal flavour, the desire of customer. It is because each region has difference climate, soil and cultivation methods, as a result, the taste of coffee production in different places have different places. Peoples are laying emphasis on the importance of healthy and they will purchase the goods or services even though it is more expensive. Starbucks emphasizes healthy life style, so they can take fresh and great ingredient to prepare their foods and drinks. It can ensure customers eat a balanced diet, excessive intake of calories, especially to lose weight. Customer can enjoy delicious desserts with the aromatic coffee at the same time. Starbucks also released new promotional food to acquire new customer which is low fat mandarin cranberry muffin, it can attract customers who care their healthy.

   2.1.2 Social media

  Starbucks focus the customer lifecycle to obtain more profit, the first stage of the customer lifecycle is customer acquisition which is a very important step of it. Starbucks has a big brand impression is not because they have budgets in millions for marketing and advertising. It is because they are most engaging companies online. In social media, Starbucks is able to spend less on the advertising media, but the performance is improving in a few years. Starbucks only spends 1% of its sales on advertising. The interaction with customers or potential customers as a relationship is not limiting at advertising. People can feel a part of company through the social media.

  Through the internet like Facebook, Twister and so on, Starbucks used it to inform customers about the new product and service, activities and so on. Social media also used to inform the customers about the promotion such as special drinks, discount and so on. This can help to acquire customer who don’t know the information of Starbucks. Starbucks’ digital media helped they to realize people’s perceptions to understand their expectation and meet their need to acquire more customer.

   2.1.3 Environment

  Besides, Starbucks provide food service for customer like gathering, meeting, parties, and event celebrations. The places can be chosen by customers themselves to organize the events, either branches of Starbucks or their office. They installed high-speed wireless network for customers who can enjoy foods and drinks with updating information to access internet in every branches. Starbucks will change rapidly in this era of technology is not backward. The wireless network service will acquire many customers who need Wi-Fi in this generation.