Starbuck’s operates in the international coffee and coffeehouse chain industry and has been in existence since 1971. It has been proudly serving the world some of its favorite sorts of coffee. Since its inception, Starbuck’s has achieved the level of being recognized as a live history and also created it as a rich history. People, who drink the Starbuck’s coffee, are considered to be the coffee gourmet – those, who understand the best blends of coffee.
This corporation is located in Seattle, Washington and may be considered as the American global coffeehouse chain and coffee company. It is the largest coffeehouse company in the world. Twenty thousand of its stores are located in sixty one countries.
Marketing Trends in Starbucks Coffee Company
It is rationally to consider the marketing trends in Starbucks Coffee Company in accordance with 4 ps of marketing mix.
Product: majority of Starbucks products are standardized all over the world. The significant cost savings have been achieved in such a manner, but still some adaptation may be useful. It is needed due to the set of objective reasons – consumers’ tastes and preferences of and regional customs and laws in particular.
Place: Currently, there is a set of Starbuck’s coffee houses in different countries. Starbuck’s outlets are evenly located among the cities – that issue makes them more accessible. Starbuck’s has made its focus on its capital and outlays more effective managing. The top management of the company applies the prudent and strategic expansion. Joint ventures establishing is the key success factor in this case.
Price: this integrative part of the product mix is the urgent question for the top management because the sales are directly influenced by it.
Promotion: Kotler (1983) considers that the marketing communications mix (or simply promotion) is constructed of the following issues: advertising, personal selling, direct marketing, promotion public relations and publicity. By making use of these tools, Starbuck’s is tending to the marketing communications strategy localization.
People: Starbuck’s should use this element of the product mix to maximize quality of the customer service.
Information Technology Management Role in the Organisational Structure of Starbucks Coffee Company
In the scopes of the research, the additional attention would be paid to the company’s information technology management due to the fact that the rapid development of the business in the scales of the Starbucks Coffee Company is not possible without the effective system of information storage, sharing and treatment.
Information and technology has become significant in the organisational design and strategy and, as a result, the isolation of information and technology professionals within the particular company organisations provides them with an option of being active in organising the organisation. The IT personnel ought to be regarded as the same fixtures and insiders, who fit easily in the running of the organisation. But information and technology have seen a number of organisations various in the management and, as a result, it has affected the important business rules that are used in the management. IT has been used for different functions, such as decision support processing, processing of information and order processing in Starbucks Coffee Company.
IT in the organisational context has not only played a significant role in the workforce, but it has also gained relevance in aspects, such as its role in the business strategy, ways of evaluating the role of IT, the general impact it bears in the organisational structure and the extent, to which the managers of the organisation can manage the operation in the organisation and also be in a position to manage IT.
Currently, the importance of IT for Starbucks Coffee Company activity is widely discussed and practically confirmed. It is the key success factor for the organisation in all its departments. It is useful in the human resource centre, procurement department, sales department, accounting department, marketing department, foreign economical activity department and other functional units of each enterprise, organisation or company.
In the organisational structure of Starbucks Coffee Company, IT plays a significant role even though there is no established clear cut between the organisational structure and IT. But IT plays a great role in the decentralization of the organisational control and also its centralization. In most cases, the organisation structure and the available IT do interact in a manner that is unpredictable but its significance is majorly based on other factors rather than on the organisational goal.
The informational technologies, applied by the Starbucks Coffee Company allow collecting and saving the information, according to the given algorithms with the help of the personal computer. It allows saving the large-scale size information on the machine-readable medium.
It is possible to state the fact that introducing of the informational systems via informational technologies into the Starbucks Coffee Company activity has improved its quality of work. More than that it is required by the nowadays business world, where time is money and the competition is won by those company, which may offer its services or products at the proper time and in the proper manner – convenient and easy to access for the customer or business partner. The internal aspect of IT implementation into the business activity has allowed the top management of the Starbucks Coffee Company to reach the effective controlling over the company activity, easy correction of the deviations and monitoring of the results.
In Starbucks Coffee Company, the model of a four level pyramid is applied. It is based on the existing different levels of hierarchical arrangement in the organisation (Clarke 2001).
At the top of the pyramid, there is the executive information system, followed by the decision support system, then the management information with transactional information system at the bottom of the pyramid of systems. The pyramid model is useful to most organisations as it was formulated on the basis of new technologies and the new categories of the information system that have been in the emergence.
Enterprise Resource Planning in Starbucks Coffee Company
The next issue to be discussed is the Enterprise resource planning (ERP) in Starbucks Coffee Company. It is the universal solution for the organisation and also an effective tool of the practical management. In the Starbucks Coffee Company, ERP is the integration of the internal and external information within the entire organisation (company). It includes the following spheres of economical activity as accounting, manufacturing, marketing, service, sales, customer relationship etc. In other words, it is possible to consider this type of planning as the whole system planning. In the Starbucks Coffee Company, such planning is carried out with the help of the specially-developed software and informational systems, which cover all the spheres of the enterprise activity and all changes, information and calculations are included into the system immediately.
The main purpose of application of such type of software and planning with the help of this software is supporting the flow of information within the Starbucks Coffee Company – among all its departments and also managing the connections with other outside stakeholders.
This type of information system also enables information sharing and other types of collaboration between different departments, which may be required by some situation. The centric Information processing also enables the Starbucks Coffee Company to reach the prompt introduction of some new information and also it improves the process of the successful management of the organisation (Khosrow-Pour 2006).
Supply Chain Management of Starbucks Coffee Company
Supply chain management (SCM) is the circulatory system of the business. It includes such processes as delivery, movement and storage of the raw materials, required for the product manufacturing, making inventories and finally, the promotion of finished goods – from the manufacturer to the end consumer.
The area of SCM responsibility for the Starbucks Coffee Company includes planning, designing and monitoring of all activities of the supply chain in order to organise and support the infrastructure, the logistic system, balancing the supply and demand for the product and finally, making objective measurement of the products’ global performance.