[20700059 - 3rd Entry] Starbucks tale underlines marketing strategy

20700059 - Kyu Chul Kim - Entry #3

Walking along the street, you can find people holding a coffee cup with their confidence in their face. And usually that coffee brand is Starbucks. Some even say that their dreams are to become successful and start a day with a Starbucks coffee. As it is, the brand of Starbucks has become a premium brand to many numbers of people.
John Moore, a former Starbucks marketing executive, spoke to the business leaders in an Auburn Montgomery Breakfast this Friday. As a former marketing executive, he pointed out that a small company needs to look big and for large one, small, focusing one basic matter. The image of one company is a big part in business, therefore a starting company needs to look big. On the other hand, big companies need to stay focused on what their mission or vision statements are.
He gave his personal experience as an example to clarify his point. In 1990’s when the company was becoming large, its focus was out of track. The Starbucks began drive-throughs, sold stuffed animals and music records, which is irrelevant to its motto: to sell the coffee experience. Its stock went down, and the company went into serious underperformance. What he did afterwards was to retrain employees to convey the coffee experience to the customers.
He also said that his competitors were trying to undercut the price on coffee by introducing coffee products but he never really cared on that because be believed that known coffee is more important than loved coffee. He believed that everyone has different opinion and loved the way people make opinion about his former company’s product.
This article reminds me again the importance of the image-making process of a company, which is marketing strategy. Specific image would make a specific impression about a certain company. One great image will play big time for the company but a poor image can make your business go down pretty quickly. Strategic marketing plan is what each company needs in order to survive. John’s point on small company becoming big in marketing and big company acting small is one of the market strategies for a company to grow more. The small company is likely to be unknown by many people, so in order for it to be known, the image should be exaggerated. Vice versa, big companies have to go back to their original purpose of founding a company and try to focus it and fit it into their changed environment, because a company can become out of track when their size goes larger.
The reason why the sizes of cups in Starbucks are different in names were always my question but after reading this article, I’ve realized that it is for specializing the coffee shop, to say to the customers that Starbucks is a uniquely different coffee shop. I’ve realized that changing just the name of even small ones can make a whole lot different image to the company.



The journal is based on the following link:

http://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080329/BUSINESS/803290340