Coffee and Starbucks

* Employment law: the profitability of the company could be influenced by US governmental concerns regarding minimum wage that companies are required to pay their staff. In addition, reduction in licensing and permit costs in countries producing coffee beans for Starbucks would lower the production cost for farmers resulting in savings that would be passed on to the consumer.

* The organization is dependent on a main competitive advantage, the retail of coffee. This could make them slow to diversify into other sectors should the need arise.

(3a): What trade-offs has Starbucks made? What different activity choices has it made from its rivals?

Many multinational corporations in the coffee industry have succeeded tremendously such as Starbucks. Each of these corporations has strategies that helped them continue to expand to nations of different cultures, ethnicities, governmental practices, and locations.

The original idea for the Starbucks format came from the 1980´s when the company´s director if marketing, Howard Schultz, came back from a trip to Italy enchanted with the Italian coffeehouse experience, the idea was to sell the company´s own premium roasted coffee and freshly brewed espresso-style coffee beverages, along with a variety of pastries, coffee accessories, teas, and other products in a tastefully designed coffeehouse setting. The focus was to sell a “third place experience”.

Maturity of Starbucks comes in United States stores where it is hard for Starbucks to extend the company

Dunning’s OLI paradigm (1976) is used to support firms to locate its production in countries that are financially beneficial for them. According to Dunning, “the paradigm offers a holistic framework to take in consideration all of the important factors that influence the decision of a MNE.” (Stefanović, 2008, p.241) FDI is determined through the composition of the three powerful advantages; ownership, location and internationalisation as shown in figure 1. The thesis is to assess, ‘why go multinational?’, ‘how to choose the best location?’ and ‘what actions have to be taken to enter a foreign market?’

Even so, just two weeks earlier Howard Schultz announced that the company will be expanding internationally. The plan is to open more than 1500 stores in Germany, France, and Britain over a 3-year span (Forbes, 2008). It is estimated that this expansion will boost revenue by more than 20 percent (MSN Money, 2008). In spite of Starbucks’ struggle among its love-hate relationship between customers and protesters, one thing that Starbucks

from a small local store to its current global enterprise. Starbucks has strategic partners all over

Starbucks is competing in an industry where marketing principles has to follow the differentiator strategy or they will lose market share. The company goal is to create high value for its customers, or the customers will simply find another place to spend their money. Starbucks marketing principles are the basis of the company's competitive advantage within the coffee industry. Starbucks products are associated with high quality, and the company dedicates itself to producing high quality products. Because of this association with high quality, Starbucks has been able to charge a higher price or premium for its products. As long as the company can protect its reputation for high quality and strong values, it will be able to maintain its premium prices.

Starbucks faced various challenges in moving forward. The first of which was brand image and a lack of product differentiation. Customers often saw little or no difference between Starbucks and smaller coffee chains. Also, in a market research study it was found that more that half of customers felt, at an increasing rate from previous years, that Starbucks only cared about profit and expansion.

Starbuck has entered into these other categories through partnerships and joint ventures. These relationships make sense, because every partnership is with a company in an industry related to Starbuck’s industry (e.g. Pepsi, Kraft, Unilever, Green Mountain etc.). Starbucks does not enter into partnerships with only one company; but collaborates with many companies, that are the respective leaders in their industry. The coffee company uses many of their partners as guides to learn from, and build relationships in a particular industry. Strategically this makes sense because Starbucks is gaining knowledge and not spending a major amount of money. Therefore, when the

Starbucks has a reputation for new product development and creativity. But new ideas can not come so often and even if they do they may not be on target. Moreover, almost the ¾ of their shops are located in the U.S. which means they are depended too much on one country. They need to spread into another group of countries in order to spread the business risk. Also organization is dependant on a main competitive advantage, the retail of coffee. This could make them slow to diversify into other sectors should the need arise.

Following its success in the United States, Starbucks ventured overseas and quickly became a globalization icon. With its rapid globalization strategy, Starbucks expanded from about 5000 stores to an estimated 15,000 stores in 2000 (Groth, 2011). By mid-2000s, Starbucks’ supply chain faced many issues, resulting with challenges of having to fulfill expansion strategies yet minimizing escalating operation expenses. By 2008, Starbucks’ stocks fell by 42% (Schultz, 2011). The rapid expansion took a toll on the sales growth and stretched the limits of the existing supply chain, which then rippled down to erode the customer-valued ‘Starbucks experience’ (Gibbons, 2011).

The core product is a premium cup of coffee. The auxiliary features include the well-educated baristas that can help select the right cup of coffee and help customers learn how to reproduce the experience at home or the office with fresh coffee bean or grounds they can purchase in store. Along with the coffees available there are also Tazo teas, hand crafted espresso and blended drinks a little something for every taste. To go with the drink