Three friends Jerry Baldwin, Zev Siegel, and Gordon Bowker from the state of Washington all shared a love for coffee; so in 1976, they opened up a coffee shop and named it Starbucks after a character in Herman Melville's "Moby Dick." Since then, Starbucks has grown to a multi-billion dollar brand, with a marketing strategy that's unconventional and incredibly effective. .
This paper will define Starbucks marketing mix and how their unique marketing strategies have paid off - and how they've garnered worldwide attention and is used as a study model for other corporations around the world.
A marketing mix, commonly referred to as the "four P's"," is the "controllable variables that the company puts together to satisfy a target group.""(Perreault, Cannon & McCarthy, 2011) These four variables area: product, price, place, and promotion. Starbucks took a very common product "coffee " and brought drinking a cup of coffee into a whole entirely new different level. The first of the four P's is the product coffee. Names like Maxwell House and Folgers Coffee have been around for decades, but Starbucks made coffee into a drink that is no longer drunk in the morning solely for the purpose of waken people up.
In 1981 Jerry Baldwin hired Howard Schultz, who at the time was a sales representative for one of Starbucks main coffee bean suppliers as the head of Starbucks management. While attending an international housewares show in Milan, Italy Schultz became increasingly aware of the passionate culture for coffee that was displayed through-out the cafes of Italy. Sitting down in a little café in Verona, Italy Schultz ordered his first cup of cafe latte and took notice how the people where gathering around with their lattes in hand for hours at a time just chatting, reading and studying. With his new found awareness of a passionate coffee culture and an acquired taste for cafe latte Schultz headed back to the U.