From the original strategic vision of offering a welcoming experience for customers, being part of their community, and becoming a warm “third place” that is part of their lives everday and that it can provide a superior cup of coffee, Howard Schultz – Starbucks’s CEO had evolved it based on the difference required during company’s development. His evolving strategy changed as his strategic vision evolved to ensure that crafting and executing strategic under the future direction and still adapt to the change of circumstances and conditions.With the broad differentiation strategy, Starbucks always focus on building its standing in the midst of customers by offering differentiating features and factors. Along with understanding customers, not only knowing how to keep them but also telling the way to attract more is the strong point of Starbucks, which resulted from the good policies, practices, business principles, procedures and high evaluated social responsibility that created a good pubilc image as well.Moreover, take advantages of his capabilities and experience, Schultz links tightly between vision and the core values of Starbucks.
Through all things above, it is claimed about the success of Schultz as a CEO of Starbucks, who did well his managing responsibities signed in well crafting and executing a good strategy. However, everything has its drawbacks and so does Schultz’s management. The more important thing is finding out the effective recommendations to sustain the company’s growth and support continued strong financial performance in the years ahead.According to Micheal Porter, the most important thing that makes strategy succeed is neither winning the rivals nor earning more and more profit, it is the unique and difference of goods and services that contribute to represent the company’s competitive advantages.
The mission of CEO is to maximize and sustain those competitive advantages and it is undeniable that Schultz did it very well which means he passed the second test in evaluating a winning strategy.In essence, Schultz had crafted a winning strategy and the detail analysis below will show how did it pass Fit Test with external, internal and dynamic fit, The Competitive Advantage Test with achieving long-lasting competitive advantage and the last, The Performace Test with two strong performance indicators: competitive strength and market standing, and profitability and financial strength. When it comes to a conclusion, the success of Starbucks comes from a winning strategy which have a good fit, offer a competitive advantage and contribute to performance improvements.
