Starbucks' way to success

From a coffee retail store in Seattle in 1971 to the most famous coffee chain brand in the world, Starbucks has created a miracle of business expansion. Coffee lovers probably know that Starbucks can develop one of the world's oldest products into a distinctive, lasting, high value-added brand. It is inseparable from the "experience culture" and unique marketing methods that it insists on at the beginning of its business. Starbucks' success stems from Starbucks' corporate culture and experience. Starbucks has undergone a great transformation from a small local coffee shop, a small company with only two stores, to a leading company in the world. Today, Starbucks stores can be seen in the United States, China and around the world, where people enjoy coffee leisurely. How did Starbucks accomplish this transformation? It can be said that Starbucks sells mass goods, and there can't be a lot of innovation in technology. However, it is now a large company with more than 10, 000 stores and annual revenue of $10 billion. The secret is that Starbucks believes that their product is not only coffee, but also the coffee shop experience culture. Coffee Religion Starbucks was founded in 1971 by Jerry Baldwin,ZevSiegl and Gordon Bowler. The company mainly sells whole coffee beans.

The name Starbucks comes from a very calm and charismatic first mate in Melville's novel Mob by Dick. His hobby is drinking coffee. Melville is regarded as one of the greatest American novelists by Hemingway, Faulkner and other famous American writers, and has a high position in the literary history of the United States and the world, but Melville's readers are not many, mainly people with good education and high cultural taste. people without certain cultural upbringing can not have read Moby Dick and know Starbucks. The name Starbucks Coffee implies its positioning of customers-it is not the general public, but people with certain social status, higher income and a certain atmosphere of life. Starbucks Coffee is not a replica of McDonald's in the beverage industry-the latter is very attractive to everyone, especially children and consumers with low incomes. Starbucks' way of doing something and not doing something has been a great success. What it pursues is not the number of customers but the quality of customers, and the customer loyalty of specific groups of people to Starbucks coffee. In the United States, Starbucks culture is still a part of American popular culture, but it is the elite culture of popular culture, which can also be said to be the popular culture of elite culture.

One of Starbucks' value propositions is that what Starbucks sells is not coffee, but people's experience of coffee. This is reminiscent of the oriental tea ceremony and tea art. The value of tea ceremony and tea art is not to quench thirst, but to obtain some unique cultural experience. Dong Qiao, a famous writer, said that people with status do not drink tea without a way, and there is a tea ceremony for tea, but is there also a way for coffee? Starbucks' success lies in its creation of coffee ways for respectable people to drink "wise coffee". Starbucks builds its own coffee style in terms of products, services and experiences. Products: the coffee beans used by Starbucks are from the world's major coffee bean producing areas and are baked in Seattle. Second, service: Starbucks requires employees to be familiar with the knowledge of coffee and the method of making coffee drinks. In addition to providing quality service to customers, it is also necessary to introduce these knowledge and methods to customers in detail. Third, experience: people who have been to Starbucks Cafe will have some unique experience, that is, Starbucks experience. On the one hand, Starbucks encourages oral or written communication between customers and between customers and Starbucks employees, and on the other hand, employees are encouraged to share their work experiences at Starbucks. For example, there are some touching stories within the company that employees are proud to be a Starbucks. Lukman, a famous religious sociologist, believes that in modern society, with the decline of institutionalized religion (tangible religion), more and more invisible religions will appear. In the star worship of boys and girls, in the fanatical cries of fans, in various subcultural groups (such as homosexual groups), we can feel that religion is better than religion. A recent article in the Economist said: "from simply identifying products to including the entire lifestyle, brands are evolving into a growing social space. In the developed world, some people think that brands have expanded into the vacuum left by the decline of organized religion. Consumers are willing to pay extra for a brand because the brand seems to represent a lifestyle or a set of ideas. Companies take advantage of people's emotional needs just as they take advantage of people's desire to spend. As a result, Nike uses "just-do-it" to convince runners that they are selling personal success; Coca-Cola associates its hissing drinks with carefree happiness.

Starbucks'"Coffee Religion" is a community of people with similar sentiments and social identities. In Schultz's words, "if people think they have the same values as a company, then they must be loyal to the company's brand." Starbucks is the "church" of this "coffee religion". Starbucks coffee shops are "churches" scattered everywhere, and Starbucks partners are the "clergy" of this kind of "religion." after strict education and value edification, they convey a set of knowledge and style to their "parishioners"-customers who often come to coffee shops to do "morning prayers" and "evening prayers". After defining Starbucks as a "coffee religion", we can better understand Starbucks brand strategy. All traditional religions are spread by word of mouth. The power of this seemingly primitive and clumsy way of spreading is amazing. For example, Jesus initially had only twelve disciples (including one traitor), and now the number of people who believe in him is close to 1.2 billion. People with a strong humanistic spirit will denounce this "coffee religion" as "fetishism", but they cannot deny that the influence of this "invisible religion" is irresistible. The book "not Coffee" to build a leadership team details the values of Starbucks culture, all of which are the infrastructure and foundation parts of a successful profitable company. But that alone does not guarantee that Starbucks will become the world's leading company. Moreover, we can see that its market share is more than twice that of the second and third in the industry combined. Only in this way can we say that Starbucks has a very arbitrary position in the industry. It is not only a leader in the industry, but also a dominant company. So what's the secret of Starbucks' success? It has a very important executive team that meets several of the criteria I have mentioned. Some companies are successful because their leadership meets the needs of development, including CEO, a key member, who contributed his vision to the company, and the senior vice president of retail, who built a very successful Starbucks operation, and Smith, a former chief operating officer and now chief financial officer, who built the company's very efficient systems. In addition to these people, there are some other outstanding talents. In short, Starbucks has a very excellent leadership team. In other words, the success of Starbucks can not only see the contribution of a person, it is the contribution of a team. After the former CEO retired, Starbucks began to participate in some other activities, such as sponsoring some basketball teams, and so on. Now, we can see Starbucks' new CEO, who took over the leadership from his predecessor.