People visit Starbuck to hangout & luxuriate in its legendary ‘experience’.
To deliver this insanely great experience, the average sizes of its 21366 odd Starbucks stores (2014) are between 1700 – 2700 square feet - big enough to accommodate comfortable seating area with free Wi-Fi, so that customers can sip Frappuccino & hangout.
Starbucks is extremely customer focused. It realized that there are some locations where potential customers wish to spend time with their Frappuccino in office, not hanging out at Starbucks. They desired there order to be processed ASAP.
Wall Street is one such location where its inhabitants wish to spend time sipping their Starbucks coffee in office, since every moment in counts.
To cater to such Target Group (TG) Starbucks is experimenting with Starbucks Express – a smaller size store – merely 540 square feet; with limited menu which have been selected so that they can be quickly made & served; the store is devoid of comfortable seating – it has wooden bar (referenced below) where a customer can stand & hangout.
Are there any other locations where customers require ‘Express’ format - near Subway stations … bus stands, etc. At such locations customers value speed.
Business Lesson:
1. Brands that desire to be successful should not be rigid about their business model nor format. They need to constantly ‘adopt’ there business model & / or format to suit there customers changing / evolving lifestyle.
2. Strategy is about being focused. It means saying 'yes' to a few things & no to everything else.
3. Charles Darwin wisdom holds true, not only for species, but also for companies. To paraphrase him - it is not the strongest of the companies that will survive but the ones that are most adaptive to change.
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In this series, Rajesh Srivastava, Business Strategist and Visiting Faculty at IIM Indore gives you a regular dose of strategy case studies to help you think and keep you one step ahead as a professional as compared to your peers. Rajesh is an alumnus of IIM Bangalore and IIT Kanpur and has over 2 decades of experience in the FMCG industry. All previous
Strategy with RS posts can be found here
