Research Paper (undergraduate) from the year 2008 in the subject
Business economics - Operations Research, grade: 1,0, University of
Applied Sciences Berlin, course: International Entrepreneurship,
language: English, abstract: 1971, when the 'Starbucks experience'
begun, Starbucks was just a small coffee shop in Seattle, USA. Today,
Starbucks, named after the first mate in Herman Melville's Moby Dick, is
the world's leading retailer, roaster and brand of specialty coffee with
millions of customer visits per week at stores in North America, Europe,
Middle East, Latin America and the Pacific Rim. Thus, within not more
than three decades, Starbucks' offering of distinctive blend of quality
coffee, neighbourly camaraderie and a unique coffeehouse culture
combined with an aggressive growth strategy helped it to become the most
famous specialty coffee shop chain in the world and a global company: In
2007, it run more than 15,000 stores worldwide by employing more than
172,000 people. But in the same year 2007 - despite revenues of USD 9.4
billion - Starbucks had to report a first-ever decline in same-store
sales. As early as the mid-1990s, analysts had been predicting that
Starbucks could not sustain such strong growth, especially in same-store
sales. For more than 10 years, Starbucks had consistently beaten these
expectations. By 2007, however, Starbucks unprecedented size, combined
with the uncertainty of the economy, had placed the company in a new
competitive game. As a result, in early 2008, Starbucks announced a
series of initiatives to cope with the new challenges and to prepare for
a successful future - all of them based on renewing the focus on
customer experience and slowing down expansion. But what constitutes the
Starbucks strategy that has been that successful in the past? What were
the main drives of the considerably growth of the Starbucks business?
And is the Starbucks strategy flexible enough to adapt to the current
challenging market conditions? After t
