Starbucks

The main reason that Starbucks had so much success in the early 1990’s was because of Howard Schultz. When Schulttz bought the company in the late 1980’s he had vision to make it the coffee shop America’s “third place”. Before Americans had only two places in their lives home and work and now Schultz would make this the third place. This new type of coffee shop will be a place where people could go relax and enjoy other people in a great environment. As soon as he bought the company he started opening more new stores. At first they their business came from white collared patrons between the ages of 24 and 44. The biggest thing that help the company was in the mid 1990’s Starbucks went public and made $25 million. This again help open even more stores across the nation. This all was done without spending anything on marketing.

The Starbucks brand was “live coffee.” The company wanted to keep the national coffee culture alive. Starbucks created experience every time you went to get a cup of coffee from one of their stores. Starbucks had three components to their branding strategy. The first was coffee itself, Starbucks said it had the highest quality coffee in the world. The company controlled the supply chain and oversaw much of the roasting processes.

The second component was service. The goal of Starbucks was to create an uplifting experience every time a customer walked in the door. Something like the workers knowing the regulars names and what drink they like would help consumers become more loyal to Starbucks.

The third component was atmosphere. Starbucks does not want customers to come in and get coffee and leave they want them to stay. This is why most stores have seating areas to encourage lounging.

I believe the main reason that customers satisfaction scores are declining is the customers at Starbucks are changing. The new customers are younger and have less education. They also do not drink traditional coffee. Instead of serving a large quantity of traditional coffee they are now doing serving a much larger quality of specialty drinks. With theses specialty drinks it takes much more time to make one. Some of these drinks take six steps or more to make one. The results are longer lines and mistakes on these complicated drinks which will bring down customer satisfaction.

I think the way that Starbuck is measuring customer satisfaction is good. However, I believe they need to measure it more often to see how the customers are changing. They have found out from these surveys that customers feel the Starbucks cares more about making money than the customer.

I think the biggest change is how Starbucks started a high quality coffee shop that sold a high quantity of traditional coffee to a coffee shop selling a high quantity of specialty drinks.

Another big change is now how you do not have to go to the Starbucks store to get Starbuck coffee. One of Starbucks biggest changes is partnering with other companies. So they can sell their product in other places like grocery stores. They also partnered with Pepsi The ideal customer for Starbucks from a profitability standpoint is not just the frequent customers that visit Starbucks on the average of eighteen