Company vision: The market served by Starbucks

The ingenuity of Starbucks’ founder and owner, Howard Schultz, lies in the successful identification and exploitation of a market that hadn’t been noticed by other entrepreneurs, prior to Starbucks’ establishment as a company.

The core idea of building and expanding a coffeehouse chain was the basis of Schultz’s innovative business thinking and practice throughout the company’s history.

So let’s try to put ourselves in the customer’s shoes.

Imagine that you want to pay a visit to your local coffeehouse during the 80s, in order to enjoy your hot cup of coffee, your little daily personal treat. Other than a couple of shops serving a limited range of the same coffee beverages, kept on their menus for ages without any change, there is not really any other opportunity to enjoy something else, a unique product and service that will make the difference, and excel over others.

Then, out of the blue, Starbucks decides to introduce the Italian way of making and serving coffee and other beverages, only this time on a larger, commercially profitable level.

In this perspective, it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to state that Starbucks took the coffeehouse business from the local corner coffee store, to the massive scale of serving customers in a, more or less, “industrialized” and standardized way. Therefore, Schultz managed to:

1. Build a strong and reputable brand around a market need that was non-existent before (virtually a market gap).

2. Expand business operations to the level of a store chain. This enabled him to gain the necessary strategic advantage over local competitors, in terms of size and volume, which was finally transformed into unrivaled brand status.

3. Not lose focus on the value of excellent, personal customer service. This approach was further enhanced by the development of an astounding range of product diversification.

As a result, Starbucks set the new standards in the industry of commercially served coffee, without decreasing the role of customer service. In fact, Starbucks also defined the new procedures that should be applied by any coffee barista and by anyone involved in making and/or serving coffee to customers, in order to win their repeated custom.

The consumer’s increased need for product information is an unquestionable fact in the modern marketplace. The consumers of coffee and related drinks need to know the quality of product and level of customer service they are about to get when they visit a specific coffeehouse. With Starbucks they can rest assured they don’t get any nasty surprises, because this innovative company has worked its best to eliminate such from its beverage serving procedures.

Although adventure is the salt of life, you wouldn’t like to regret the moment that you decided to have your coffee and relax in that coffeehouse that eventually looked like a madhouse and served awful beverages.

Sources and further reading:

Starbucks: The Value of Brand Management

Starbucks Mission Statement Explained