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Starbucks Case Study

Decent Essays

NAMES: Rolando Montenegro Campollo - Federico Monzón Nájera

STARBUCKS- CASE STUDY
Starbucks Discussion
Questions

1. In the beginning, how was Starbucks different from other coffee options for coffee drinkers in the United States? What activities and assets did Starbucks leverage to differentiate itself from competitors? Starbucks strategy at the beginning was based upon creating a symbolic-expressive value trough a social meaning concept of offering the American community meeting places; this positioned its original products and made associations to identify consumers with self-expression providing personal, social and sociocultural meaning.

Assets acquired such as Starbucks-branded locations were decorated with …show more content…

3. When Schultz returned to Starbucks as CEO in 2008, how had the competitive context changed since his first tenure running the firm? What had caused or facilitated the changes?

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 context change in form that Starbucks found itself competing with smaller chains that resembled its former pre-expansion model with competitors focusing in creating symbolic-expressive value and fast food restaurants that had started to offer specialty coffee with more aggressive advertisement at a lower cost. The competitive context changed for Starbucks because it’s focus in mass distribution channels and its retail footprint strategy stated its product within a standard performance product value; this affected the value perception of the product.

4. Why did Schultz respond the way he did to the changes he found in 2008? What was he trying to achieve? Were his responses effective or ineffective?

Schultz tried to make changes in order to adapt to the new competitive context. He tried to reduce costs to be able to compete with their low

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