Starbucks Marketing

I. Executive summary

Starbucks Corporation is a leading roaster and retailer of coffee in the world. The company has been in existence since 1972 and has grown to be in over 16,000 locations in more than 50 countries (Starbucks, 2010). The company serves millions of customers every day offering them the best services and products it can as it inspires and nurtures the human spirit. Starbucks has a mission statement of structuring a pleasant work environment in which employees are treated with respect and dignity, incorporating diversity in all its business aspects to deliver fresh coffee, satisfying customers, and developing profitability for the company's success.

In order to maintain this high quality, the company's buyers travel all over the world in search for the best quality coffee to use in its products. The company has strong emphasis in maintaining the quality of its products and services and has developed practices that ensure that this quality is maintained (Michelli, 2007).

This report emphasizes on the aspects of improving customer service through analysis and evaluation of the critical service point in the service encounter and formulating a market plan. I will briefly summarize the micro and macro environment of Starbucks, the market marketing research of the Starbucks, the market segmentation and targeting to the Starbucks, and the Starbucks' marketing mix responds to changing market conditions.

II. micro and macro environment of the Starbucks

1. The microenvironment of the Starbucks is an important affection, the Starbucks is a chain, and there are many kinds of global coffeehouse chains, but why does Starbucks become more successful than other coffeehouse chains. The microenvironment of the Starbucks is involved with the distributors, customers, competitors and public.

The distributors of the Starbucks includes the Certified Fair Trade coffee and the Ethos water. According to Starbucks, they purchased 2,180 metric tons (4.8 million pounds) of Certified Fair Trade coffee in fiscal year 2004 and 5,220 metric tons (11.5 million pounds) in 2005. They have become the largest buyer of Certified Fair Trade coffee in North America (10% of the global market). And the Ethos water is a brand of clean bottled water acquired by Starbucks in 2003. These two companies provide the best raw material to the Starbucks, and ensure the best quality of the Starbucks coffee.

The market positioning of Starbucks is aimed to those office workers who are highly-paid and longing for stylish life, but not the general populace.

The competitors of the Starbucks are involved the McCafé, Costa, Tchibo and the Dunkin' Donuts, all of the global coffee chain are the competitors of the Starbucks.

2. The macroenvironment consists of the larger forces which affect the way in which an organization operates and over which the organization has little or no control, and it can be known as the acronym PEST, which is standing for the Political /Legal, Economic, Sociocultural, and Technological.

P is standing for the political. The Starbucks is a company which provides the coffee service, and they don't involve the country's monopoly industries and scarce resources, so the stable political environment is the basis of the Starbucks to explore the market.

E is standing for the economic. Nowadays the economics of the world is developing quickly, and the income of residents is increasing. And provide a stable economic environment to the Starbucks, it is beneficial for Starbucks Coffee open up the market steadily.

S is standing for the sociocultural. Nowadays the people who love to drink coffee and accept coffee is increasing. And the good environment, the good atmosphere and other subsidiaries also brings many potential consumers to the Starbucks coffee. With the development of the coffee culture and the popularity of coffee culture, consumers began to cognitive coffee brand, style, and pure of coffee. And begin to know how to enjoy the coffee. Instant coffee has been far from representative of the coffee consumed, the popularity of the original bean coffee is a huge business opportunity. Culture of coffee is now mainstream coffee industry as a whole, is developing fairly rapidly.

T is standing for the technological. The Starbucks use the world's top coffee beans, hand-crafted espresso and a variety of coffee hot and cold drinks, fresh and delicious pastries food as well as the coffee machine coffee mugs, brewed freshly ground coffee beans, and the sworn taste fresh cream. The advancement in information technology will enhance the management efficiency of the Starbucks chain management, so that Starbucks' headquarter can grasp the management of all branches in a short period of time, and give the guidance effectively. As a result, the information technology builds a highly efficient platform to the Starbucks' management chain.

III. The market research of the Starbucks coffee

Marketing research is the systematic and objective process of generating information for use in making marketing decisions. This process includes defining the problem and identifying what information is required to solve the problem, designing and implementing the collection of data, analyzing the results, and communicating the findings and their implications. So the market research is really important for the Starbucks. And the market research is divided into two techniques, and they are the qualitative and quantitative technique. For example in the Starbucks, we can set up an in-depth interview. We can catch a customer of the Starbucks and have a face-to-face interview. The interviewer could ask some questions and ask the interviewees to give their own opinions. This type of research usually gives much more qualitative information. And the other way to do the market research is let people filing the questionnaire. This type of research tends to require a larger amount of research to be undertaken in order to be deemed as valid.

IV. Market segmentation and target of the Starbucks

Market segmentation is a marketing strategy that involves dividing a broad target market into subsets of consumers who have common needs and applications for the relevant goods and services. Depending on the specific characteristics of the product, these subsets may be divided by criteria such as age and gender, or other distinctions, like location or income. Marketing campaigns can then be designed and implemented to target these specific customer segments. ( Malcolm, 2003)

Since Starbucks has a wide product range, which includes hot drinks like coffee, tea, cold drinks like Frappuccino, coffee beans, hot