Starbucks cooperates with many brands, such as Tazo Tea, Seattle's Best Coffee, Evolution Fresh,La Boulange, Teavana. The most recently cooperate brands are La Boulange and Teavana. La Boulange brings delicious, high quality pastries, together with Starbucks to creat a warm, inviting space where customers can gather with friends and family to share time, stories, great coffee and fantastic food. Starbucks opened the first Teavana Fine Teas + Teavana Tea Bar at 1142 Madison Avenue (cross street: 85th Street), it is a modern tea bar with a wide range of unique hot brewed and iced teas, tea lattes and distinctive sparkling and tea fusion beverages. Resellers Starbucks coffee company is reseller company which is more like retail business because they buy coffee beans from producers and make high quality of coffee drinks and mainly directly sell coffee drinks to final consumers. Major Equipment
In order to get high quality coffee drinks, Starbucks purchases very expensive espresso machines. They are custom-designed for Starbucks, it helps baristas grind and pour shots to the precise time required for the peak flavor.
Positioning Starbucks has positioned itself as an high-level brand. Starbucks remaining high quality of coffee drinks and services. Customers are willing to pay for their high quality of products, services, comfortable environment, and famous brand effect. Starbucks have to keep their high quality and value to satisfy customers. Market Segmentation Starbucks use multisegment targeting strategy. For example, Starbucks use phychographic segmentation( on the basis of personality, motives, lifestyles, and geodemographics). For example, there are much more Starbucks in Manhattan (which is more like business area) than in Queens (which is more like live area.) Many business men, women and student like to grab a coffee, then go to work or study; and business men, women and students need a place to communicate with their business partners or classmate. So there are many Starbucks located in Mahattan. Geographic segmentation( market size, climate, region and so on). Starbucks opened participate stores all over the world. consider of different cultures, habits and traditions, Starbucks offers different drinks in different countries. Benefit segmentation: Starbucks offers lucky dozen reward and free birthday drink reward to their registered customers. Every registered customer will get a free birthday drink for celebrate his/her birthday. Moreover, registered Starbucks cardholders can get stars when they purchase Starbucks drinks. When they collect 12 stars, they can get a free drink or food at Starbucks participate stores.
Recently in October 2013, Starbucks opened the first-of-its-kind Teavana Fine Teas + Tea Bar with Teavana (which Starbucks bought for $620 million last November), in New York City’s Upper East Side. The Tea Bar will elevate the premium tea experience by delivering a carefully curated assortment of handcrafted tea beverages, premium loose leaf teas, tea-inspired food offerings and beautifully made tea merchandise, making the ritual of tea more elevated and accessible for customers. Over the course of the past year, Starbucks has leveraged a number of its unique assets and capabilities into the Teavana customer experience – including social, digital media, loyalty, card and mobile. The first Teavana Fine Teas + Tea Bar will bring together Starbucks strengths in store design and customer experience, with Teavana’s deep expertise in tea sourcing and blending. Starbucks will slowly add tea bars to its 300 or so existing Teavana stores, which until now sold loose-leaf tea plus gifts and accessories like ceramic teapots and stainless steel infusers. As well as drinks like Matcha Lattes, the new tea bars will sell food to appeal to a health-conscious customer According to recent Euromonitor data, with Starbucks-saturated countries like Japan, China, Canada and the U.K. leading the trend. Globally, tea is the second-most consumed beverage besides water. While Americans still consume coffee at a far greater rate than tea, their taste for leaves versus beans is growing. Data from the Tea Association USA says America’s interest in tea has grown by 16% over the past five years.
Starbucks use some social media to facilitate conversation.
First of all, Starbucks have accounts on mainstream social networking websites, like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, and Flicker group. And on all of these websites, Starbucks have a quite large number of followers, so they can communicate with their customers conveniently.
The most important one I want to mention is, on the official Starbucks website, there is a section called "My Starbucks Idea". People can leave his/her idea to Starbucks on the website. People can share the ideas that matter to them and they can find out how Starbucks are putting those ideas to work, to shape the future of Starbucks. Any visitor can look at the ideas that have been posted and read Starbucks Ideas in Action blog. If people sign up to be a registered member of the site, they can also submit their own ideas, vote and comment on ideas submitted by other people.
Starbucks sometimes use social media to hold some special event. For example, few days ago, Starbucks hold a "tweet a coffee" event on Twitter. Tweet-a-coffee is a NEW way to send $5 Starbucks Card eGifts to Twitter friends and followers. It is very simple to tweet a $5 dollar eGift card to your twitter friends, or followers, just go to twitter, link it to your Starbucks account and tweet @tweetacoffee to @the one you want to give him/her a eGift card, then you are all set, he/she can redeem the eGift card right on his/her mobile phone or at Starbucks participating stores.
Starbucks products are mostly consumer products, which means their product are bought to satisfy an customer's personal wants and needs.
Product line Product line means a group of closely related product items. To Starbucks,they have several product lines: Coffees contain iced coffee, latte, frappucino, espresso and so on; Beverages like tazo tea, juices,milk; food include muffin, croissant, sandwich, salad; equipment like french press, coffee grinder, espresso machine, coffee machine and so on. Brand loyalty Brand loyalty is a consistent preference for one brand over all others. For me, and maybe for many other customers, Starbucks not only provide high quality coffee drinks, but also provide their customers a comfortable and relax place to stay, people enjoy coffees and environments that Starbucks provide, they get used to come to Starbucks frequently, then become Starbucks loyal customers who prefer go to Starbucks than other coffee houses. In addition, one of the important element of the reason I have brand loyalty for Starbucks is there are Starbucks stores near my school and my home. It is very easy to find a Starbucks store on the street, so it is very convenient.
Starbucks trademark Starbucks trade mark is a green roundness with a two-tailed mermaid, or which was called a siren, a mythical creature whose stories tell of luring fisherman through song. Before 2011, there are also "Starbucks coffee" brand logo on it, but as Starbucks is well known by people, and with the meaning of expanding to other areas not only coffee drinks, Starbucks take off the logo of "Starbucks coffee"
Personal selling. Starbucks are using personal selling business. Starbucks main purpose is to sell coffee drinks and good services. It is more like direct communication between a salesperson and individual customers. Baristas of Starbucks can communicate with their customers one to one and answer questions their customers had, and tell the differences between different type of coffee drinks. Selling coffee drinks are mostly short term sales, it is focus on products delivery and sales follow-up is short term. Retaining Loyal Customers
In order to retain loyal customers, Starbucks gives out Starbucks card membership. Here are three levels of Starbucks card membership requirements and benefits of each level: 1) Welcome level
All the customers need to do is register their Starbucks card. (People can get Starbucks card at any retail store or via Starbucks website.) Then they can enjoy a free birthday drink each year and plus 15% off of a purchase on Starbucks online store.
2) Green level Every customer who registered a Starbucks card can get one star per visit to a Starbucks store. After you get 5 star, you are at green level. Customers at green level can get the benefits from the welcome level, and in additional, customers can get free refills in the store if they paying with registered Starbucks Cards or mobile app get customers brewed and iced coffee and tea refills at no charge during their visit at a participating store. 3) Gold level
After customers who have registered a Starbucks collect 30 stars within 12 month, they are upgraded to Gold level. With Gold level, customers can get all the Welcome and Green level benefits plus : I)free drink or food reward every 12 stars.
II) Personalized Gold card with the customer's name and cardholder time. III) Special offers just for Gold card members. Starbucks will send Gold card members special offers and coupons via mail, email or text message.
Once customers are at Gold level it takes another 30 Stars to maintain Gold level for another 12 months. But if customers don’t qualify for the Gold level again by their anniversary date (i.e. the date they qualified for the Gold level), they’ll revert to the Green level and lose all their Stars. If a customer earn 30 Stars again within 12 months, he/she will move from Green level right back to Gold level. With this Starbucks card system, as there are both rewards(free refill, free drink and so on) and threats (threat of not qualify for golden card for another year), Starbucks can retain a lot of loyal customers. Cross-Selling other Products and Services Starbucks carries some other brand products, too. Such as Tazo tea, La Boulange bakery, Evolution Fresh juice, French Press machine and so on.
Starbucks have their website to introduce their coffee drinks and other products. The website also provides news, contact, and their company information. Customers can login their Starbucks accounts and manage their Starbucks card. Also, there has an online store section, customers can buy Starbucks products online at home. Sampling
Starbucks gives out samples sometimes. People can get samples for free and try if they like that kind of drink. In this way, customers be familiar with their coffees or new drinks, if they like the drink after they tasted the sample, they may purchase from the Starbucks store. It is also good for Starbucks to discover potential customers. Sales promotion
Starbucks always have some sales promotion. Usually there are 'happy hours' and 'holiday promotion' in Starbucks retail store. It is during certain days, from 2pm-5pm, or from 3pm-5pm,the specific coffee drinks are half prices or buy one get one free. There's also another sales promotion which is called 'Treat Receipt': During certain days, if you purchase drinks before 2pm, get any grande size drinks for $2 dollars after 2pm. Also there are some sales promotion only for their registered customers. They will send you a code with a expire date that you can use to get discount at a specific drinks or sandwiches. They will inform their customer these sales promotion by email, or by the Starbucks mobile app. Product Placement
TV commercials are not very effective, because most people open their television for news, dramas, movies and so on. But nobody will open television for just watching TV commercials. It is more interest and rememberable if products appears in movies, TV series. Starbucks also have Product placement in movies and Tv series. The most recently one I saw was in '2 Broke Girls', Max and Caroline hold Starbucks drinks. 
