Case The Coffee Shop Market Starbucks Marketing Essay

Case The Coffee Shop Market Starbucks Marketing Essay Starbucks Corporation is an international coffeehouse chain, founded in 1971 in Seattle, Washington. Starbucks serves a variety of beverages including brewed coffee, tea, hot chocolate, espresso and a selection of bottled drinks. Starbucks also sells whole bean coffee and a variety of ready-to-eat snacks. The first Starbucks location to open outside of North America was in Tokyo in 1996; and from then on Starbucks became an international brand, expanding both nationally and globally. This report will attempt to examine the situation of Starbucks in Japan. It will bring out the marketing strategy to be adopted for a rise in profitability of Starbucks Japan in the next two years. In addition, it will attempt to explain the use of marketing mix to aid the chosen strategy. SWOT ANALYSIS: 1.1 STRENGTHS: 1.1.1 Strong brand image: Starbucks brand name, quality customer service and store ambience are its key strengths. It has maintained its international operations to ensure consumer recogn ition. Starbucks is renowned for its high quality products and has maintained a consistently positive consumer experience that has helped Starbucks build a strong brand image. Starbucks spends less than 1% of revenue on advertising and promotion each year which indicates they rely on an established company image (P. Ghauri, International marketing case study: Starbucks-Going Global Fast). Starbuck’s key competitor in Japan-Doutor coffee, had taken advantage of Starbuck’s brand image and copied its logo, while replicating the experience rendered to customers in its retail outlets. (Ono, 2003). This shows that the Starbucks image is a strength worth mimicking. With a well-established brand image in America, it was sure to expect recognition in the Japanese market, because the consumers there have a fondness for everything western. (http://azjatycka.wordpress.com/2009/11/05/international-marketing-strategy-of-starbucks-in-japan-success-or-a-failure/) 1.1.2 Commitment to c ommunity: Starbucks contributes a considerable amount of its resources to corporate social responsibility programs (Kotabe & Helsen, 2004). According to Butler (2006)-â€Å"CSR programs influence 70% of all consumer purchasing decisions, with many investors and employees also being swayed in their choice of companies†. As a result, Starbucks involvement in the CSR programs helps its competitiveness in the business world. 1.1.3 Widespread Presence in International Markets: Starbucks has ventured into foreign markets with astonishing pace opening its outlets in 40 countries with 2068 stores worldwide. This widespread expansion has allowed its presence to be felt across the globe. 1.1.4 Retail outlets present at convenient and accessible locations: Starbucks has opened a number of coffee shops at convenient locations like shopping malls, libraries, university campuses, office buildings etc. They are typically located in high traffic, high visibility locations.(Starbucks annual r eport, 2008) 1.1.5 Presence of a variety of food items & Beverages in addition to Coffee: Starbucks stores offer a choice of regular and decaffeinated coffee beverages, a broad selection of Italian-style espresso beverages, cold blended beverages, iced shaken refreshment beverages and a selection of premium teas. Starbucks stores also offer a variety of fresh food items, including healthier choice selections focussing on high-quality ingredients, nutritional value and great flavour. 1.1.6 Well Developed Corporate Strategy and Good Marketing skills. Weaknesses: 1.2.1 Lack of internal focus: Starbucks focuses too much on over-expansion, at times tending to ignore the problems arising within–consistent employer dissatisfaction.

Is leadership and management the same of different Analyse different Essay

Is leadership and management the same of different Analyse different perspectives and present your argument - Essay Example The question is worth-discussing, so this work will try to define who leaders and managers are and what are their tasks through the history of leadership and management beginning from 80th till the formation of modern approach. Leaders and managers: who are they? One of the simplest approaches to differentiation of management and leadership was presented by Prof. John Kotter in his book â€Å"A Force for Change†. â€Å"The purpose of leadership is seen in bringing about movement and useful change and the purpose of management is to guarantee stability, consistency, order and efficiency† (Kotterman, 2006). Both, leadership and management are important for success of any organization. From definition suggested by Kotter it is clearly seen that it is not only possible to interchange these concepts, but it should be mentioned that these concepts define quite different things: management is for stability, leadership is for change. Moreover, it is quite relevant to note that managers and leaders can be people from the same class. A very interesting explanation of management and leadership is given in the book â€Å"Leaders: The Strategies for Taking Charge† (1985): â€Å"Managers are people who do things right and leaders are people who do the right thing† (Fairholm 1998, p. 17). ... This interest was caused by the growing development of Japanese business world. Japanese organizations had their secret: they substituted mechanical function of managers by a facilitative and developmental function (Fairholm, 1998). In America this tendency was ‘wrongly copied’ and managers were mixed up with leaders by a mistake. This process is perfectly described in the following citation: â€Å"To punish managers for letting us down, we blessed leaders with the good-guy styles and damned management with the bad-guy ones. The next step was to portray leaders as transformational and managers as transactional† (Kotterman, 2006). It is clearly seen, that in 80s it was rather hard to differ between managers and leaders. Moreover, a function of managers was even neglected and very often at that time managers were described as ‘control freaks’ (Kotterman, 2006). Kotter’s claim was one of the most understandable at that complicated period: he claim ed that managers have to deal with difficulties and leaders are focused on change and innovation. Generally, in 80s the main interest of scientists and researchers was focused on leaders, while the function of managers was not interesting for them anymore. Managers’ function to motivate employees for successful performance was taken away from them by leaders. In the book â€Å"Leadership and Performance Beyond Expectations† (1985) Bernard Bass claims that leaders have to be responsible for human resources motivation. The main drawback of researches and studies of that time was a lack of attention to the performance of leader’s functions. In other words, these studies were not practically implemented (Fairholm, 1998; (Martin, 1999). It

Case study about John F kennedy and the bay of pigs , cuban missile

About John F kennedy and the bay of pigs , cuban missile crisis - Case Study Example However, this president could later on be seen as living up to the policies of his predecessor; Eisenhower. This was clearly evident when he decided to adopt the Bay of Pigs Invasion and gave a go head to his military without giving it much thought. President J. F Kennedy became a leader during the era of nuclear war. He believed that no nation could confidently win a nuclear war. According to Kennedy, the main cause of war and civil strife in the 20th century was Miscalculations. He, therefore, with the counsel of his Intelligence agency, designed and employed a military strategy that was known as the Flexible Response. This strategy was put in place with the anticipation that it would reduce such wars that result from miscalculations. Even though J. F Kennedy had been regarded by many as one of the most flexible and rational presidents of the United States, there had been criticism that he was not as prudent as Eisenhower and, had made the USA even worse. However, these arguments are subjects of a heated debate as there are no diplomatic records on this topic2. By the time Kennedy came to power, the Soviet Union had made several steps ahead of the US in the space exploration. The Soviet had already acquired considerable skills in nuclear war and was becoming a threat to the US, which was at that time very vulnerable to the missile attacks. Soviet Prime Minister, Nikita Khrushchev, in one of the speeches, had announced that their nation was ready for any liberal war3. The Bay of Pigs invasion was a planned attack on Cuba by the American Central Intelligence Force. It was during the time when Cuban government, under the leadership of Fidel Castro, was experiencing defection from the government officials and the citizens4. United States of America, therefore, decided to take advantage of this situation and arranged to attack Fidel in disguise of the defectors. The invasion had been planned before President Kennedy took over from Eisenhower.