Threats And Threats For Starbucks

The “Coffee Wars – The Big Three: Starbucks, McDonald’s and Dunkin’ Donuts” article focuses on the company analysis of the Starbucks brand and how its main competitors, McDonald’s and Dunkin Donuts, has affected their brand and driven competition higher. Even though there are many companies trying to enter the specialty coffee market, these three companies own the majority of the market share. With Starbucks’ top quality and above average prices they hold a different market than the fast coffee/food market of Dunkin’ Donuts and Starbucks; yet the competitive moves Dunkin’ Donuts has made over the years in order to compete with Starbucks and surpass McDonald’s has driven competition up between all three companies. The competition has stiffened ever more in the past ten years due to the changing economy. This led to “the big three” to come up with different techniques to gain competitive advantage over the other. Although the competition between these companies is to gain most of the market share, consumers are still loyal to a certain brand; this makes it difficult to gain each other’s clientele. McDonald’s continues to appeal to customers who want value and speed, Dunkin’ Donuts focuses on the middle-class, while Starbucks a customer who desires a higher quality product along with being recognized for using the brand.

Starbucks is dominant coffee brand in North America, which also is well-known worldwide. Established in 1971 as coffee shop oriented to a niche of coffee purists, in late 1980’s it turned to be a constantly growing chain of stores that sold whole-beans and premium-priced coffee to mostly affluent, well-educated customers. In years 1992-2002 company was showing at least 5% annual growth. And by 2002 Starbucks was serving already 20M customers in 5886 stores (both operated and licensed) around the globe, had $3.3 billion net revenues and was opening 3 new stores a day in average.

Since Starbucks entered the coffee retail business, the company has made many trade-off business decisions. The first major trade-off was made when Howard Schultz wanted to acquire present day Starbucks from three entrepreneurs Baldwin, Siegel and Bowker. Therefore, Schultz prior to the acquisition made the trade-off to open his own coffee bar in 1986 instead of staying at Starbucks as the manager of retail sales and marketing. A bold feat, Schultz was able to replicate success and was offered to buy Starbucks for $4 million. At the time of the acquisition, many investors, including the former Starbucks owners, would not expect that the American consumer would pay a premium for coffee products. Schultz, after calculating the opportunity cost, was convinced that Starbucks would become a large coffee chain not only in the United States but internationally too. Reflecting this approach, Schultz’s trade-off worked. Starbucks, according to our book has revenue exceeding $13 billion and nearly 200,000 employees. The company has also expanded to 40 countries with 17,000 stores (Hill et al., 2015).

What is a Strength, Weakness, Opportunity, and Threat (SWOT) Analysis? It is very simple actually and something several business use in order to evaluate their success.

SWOT Analysis is a simple but useful framework for analyzing your organization's strengths and weaknesses, and the opportunities and threats that the company face. It helps you focus on your strengths, minimize threats, and take the greatest possible advantage of opportunities available to you will giving you the opportunity to ward off possible threats from external sources.

A SWOT analysis is a distinguished instrument for examination of a company’s strategic situation and environment. Its objective is to recognize the schemes that will best support a business’ assets and competencies to the desires of the market. It is the basis for assessing the core abilities and restrictions and the prospects and dangers from the external environment. SWOT stands for: strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Strengths and weaknesses are deemed internal influences where there is some level of control; while opportunities and threats are deemed external influences where there is essentially no control.

Swot analysis refers to the strength, weaknesses, opportunities and the threats that a business faces. Every company has its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats that it faces.

The process of SWOT analysis is a universal method widely approached in corporations to scan the internal and external environment so that companies can deploy relevant countermeasures to make improvements. It contains four elements, they are strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (Helms & Nixon, 2010).

SWOT analysis helps you decide your position against your competitors, identifies best future opportunities, and highlight current and future threats. SWOT analysis is an acronym for Strength, Weakness, Opportunity and Threat. Strengths and weaknesses are internal factors that you have within your business on which you have full control whereas opportunities and threats are external factors on which you have no control.

SWOT analysis covers the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities & threats which a company is facing in its internal & external environment. Strengths & weaknesses fall under the internal environment of the company and opportunities & threats fall under the

In general the coffeehouse industry in the United States was experiencing an increase in coffee consumption per capita due to the “Starbucks effect”. At this time Starbucks was operating approximately 20,000 stores in the United States and was living a fast expansion strategy worldwide.

The threats to the Starbucks Corporation are associated with competitive rivalries in the coffee market, rise in price of raw materials, cultural and political factors related international business.

In terms of competition and the forces, which could limit the success of Starbucks it is important they stay ahead or even with other companies concerning innovative products. Many more micro companies are coming up with new products with a similar quality and a lower price/cost. It is important that Starbucks continues to search for innovative products to continually satisfy their customers. At the same time “rivalry” amongst Starbucks and smaller providers of coffee will continue to increase as the demand for coffee continues. The buyers bargaining power is significant as they can determine the cost, type of product, quantity and ultimately

Factors in the global environment provide both opportunities and strengths for Starbucks. Opportunities such as increased revenues, further expansions, and achieving their goal of becoming the most respected brand worldwide. Starbucks also faced threats. These threats include dealing with growing antiglobalization overseas and their huge risk of less return on each overseas store, this deriving from overseas operations being run by local partners instead of Starbucks

The first important part of a SWOT analysis is to improve the viability of an organization. SWOT identifies the risk which can arise from future threats coupled with the organization weakness. For example, a pharma company ABC has invested heavily in R& D of existing product where a new competitor is also entering with same product. Then company ABC has to decide whether it is strategically important to deal with external threat or improve the internal weakness. Company ABC can continue the R & D progress to improve the quality of existing product or else can diversify the resource to offer the product at less cost i.e. improving its efficiency. So, SWOT plays an important role in such situation and proves to be a beneficial tool to take appropriate decision of improving the weakness