MKT 606 Consumer Behaviour Case Study Sample Answer

Below is the solution to the Starbucks: Delivering Customer Service case study from Harvard Business School. Allassignmenthelp.com help students to do case study assignments from any Journal, business school in Singapore or globally.

Introduction

Howard Schultz was the person behind the success of Starbucks’. After taking the charge from the founders, he immediately started opening new stores. The stores in turn was successful in selling whole beans and premium quality and premium-priced coffee beverages. It catered mostly to the affluent, well-educated masses aged between 25 to 44 years. As a result, the company achieved a feat of opening 140 such stores in Northwest region of USA including Chicago. The success of Starbucks’ can be attributed to its mantra of “Live Coffee”. This strategy had three components: firstly the better quality coffee that was sourced from Central & South America, Africa and Asia-Pacific regions. Secondly, service that represented “customer intimacy” in order to create an uplifting experience. Thirdly, the atmosphere of ambience that wants them to stay for longer as well as lounging and layout designs created an appeal to those who wanted to linger. Once, the management team of Starbuck’s took notice of the market trends, it took the following steps to enhance its brand image:

• The trend should be everywhere
• Better coffee on the run
• Provide an atmosphere to meet and move on
• Place of convenience 
• Consistently accessible

Strategic Marketing Starbucks - Shortcomings

Even though, Starbucks’ being one of the world’s most successful brands, there was a clear lack of strategic marketing group. It was due to the fact that the company had no chief marketing officer while its department of marketing performed its functions in three separate groups. The first one was market research group responsible for gathering and analyzing market data being requested by various business units. The second one was category group that was required to develop new products and manage the menu and margins and thirdly, there was a marketing group that was responsible for developing the quarterly plans for promotions (Thompson & Arsel, 2004). Thus, such an approach forced the senior employees of the company to take marketing oriented responsibilities. As per the observations of Christine Day, because of the lack of strategic marketing group, every needed to get involved in a collaborative marketing effort. This approach led the customer and market related trends sometimes be overlooked. She added that the company is not that disciplined when this data is used to make decisions.

Growth of Starbucks

America. Since then, Schultz has remained the chairman and chief global strategist in a complete control of the company. Its sales had climbed exponentially at a compound annual growth rate of 40% also because of the fact that the company had gone public and as result the net earnings had risen at a CAGR of 50%. Today the company is successfully serving around 20 million unique customers through a whopping 5,000 stores around the globe. The growth can be understood by the fact that there are three stores opening every day. Its success is also attributed to an impressive strategy that it had spent almost nothing in terms of advertising to achieve this feat. From 2002 onward, the two most prominent drivers of the company growth have been the retail expansion and product innovation (Alon, Jaffe & Vianelli, 2013). The product expansion allowed substantial number of people are consuming specialty coffee today, the company took a note about expanding it to the remaining eight states and thirdly, the company understood it is far from reaching saturation level as yet. While, no such strategy was made in 1992.

Recommendation

As per the recommendations of research team and observations of Christine Day herself, the ideal target market of the Starbucks’ should be: Adults – its main market is the men and women aged between 25 to 40 years because they account for almost 49% of the total business and this target audience is growing at an annual rate of 3%. The next market that Starbucks’ should keep in mind is Young Adults. This age group consists of the customers belonging to the age group of 18 to 24 years. The college students are the ones that are interested in hanging out, have fun and discuss a lot of their issues, write term papers and meet people. The appeal of the company is its brand name among its customers directly via introducing new technology as soon as it becomes available ("Who Is Starbucks' Target Audience?", n.d.). The next target audience is that of kids and teens as kids go there with their parents, thereby utilizing kid-friendly products as well as high calorie and low caffeine content drinks. It is even considering to focus on steamed milk which is also referred to as ‘babyccinos’

References

Alon, I., Jaffe, E., & Vianelli, D. (2013). Global marketing. New York: McGraw-Hill Higher Education.
Moon, Y., & Quelch, J. (2006). Starbucks: Delivering Customer Service. S3.amazonaws.com. Retrieved 21 March 2016, from https://s3.amazonaws.com/prod_object_assets/assets/101459746239503/Starbucks.pdf?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAIXM6FRIC5QVSA63Q&Expires=1458567495&Signature=y4pbEIsL0039WSxRHXaq0BK5UPU%3D#_=_
Thompson, C., & Arsel, Z. (2004). The Starbucks Brandscape and Consumers’ (Anticorporate) Experiences of Glocalization. J CONSUM RES, 31(3), 631-642. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/425098
Who Is Starbucks' Target Audience?. Smallbusiness.chron.com. Retrieved 21 March 2016, from http://smallbusiness.chron.com/starbucks-target-audience-10553.html

This is one of the small sample done by our online assignment helpers in Singapore a while back. However, we can write custom assignments for your on any subject, topic from any university in Singapore. Be it SIM University of National University of Singapore Homework, we are always here to help you. You can take help wtih Rewards management, financial management, accounting, statistics, Electrical engineering assignment and many other courses from our experts.