Business Level and Corporate Level Strategies

[Name of the Professor]

[Date of Submission]

Business Level and Corporate Level Strategies

Introduction

No other coffee house or retail coffee cafés can be as famous as Starbucks itself, which is a globally renowned coffeehouse brand name that has been successful in establishing both its name and brand since its inception in 1971. The company began its humble operations as a roaster and retailer of whole bean and ground coffee in Seattle. Today the company on average serves over a million customers daily throughout its various outlets and franchises operating around the globe. The main mission of this organization is to inspire and nurture the human spirit, through providing a friendly environment that exudes qualities of combining communication with a sense of community, through its coffees around various neighborhoods all over the world. Today, Starbucks has over seventeen thousand and six hundred stores that can be found in over fifty-five countries such as Bahamas, Canada, Bahrain, Chile, Cyprus, China, Japan, Oman, America and Switzerland to name a few (www.starbucks.com).

This paper aims to discuss the business and corporate level strategies of Starbucks with an analytical view of how the currently employed strategies by the company are beneficial for its long-term success, along with the company's competitive environment analysis.

Discussion

Beard & Dess (1981) opines that an organization's strategy is one of the most complex and broadest concepts that are used for studying an organization analytically. This is further related with the volatility of the continuously changing business environment due to which many businesses, in order to continue functioning effectively, adapt and implement new strategies to compete with the changing business situations. However, the two distinct forms of strategies, namely the business and corporate level strategies of an organization, are the main types of organizational strategies that help to critically review and analyze the situation and position of a firm, in various aspects. Both these strategies are reflective of a business organizations intra-industry and inter-industry strategies. These are discussed in detail in the following sections.

Business level strategies of Starbucks

Business level strategies are defined in terms of the differences in the firm's characteristics, which are relevant for its competitive success, or failure in the industry of its operation. Thus, each organization will have a distinct business level strategy for each of the different industries that it operates in, as well as the characteristics of that firm's business level strategy would be measured against the norms relevant to the characteristic of the industry that it operates in (Beard & Dess, 1981).

To discuss about the company's business level strategies, Starbucks employs a differentiation strategy that effectively utilizes its core competencies and product quality to enhance its value and customer experience, even further. This is further supported by Gates et al (n.d) who comments that because of employing a strong differentiation strategy the company has been able to turn its half a dollar commodity into four dollars worth of final good, purchased by the customer. Furthermore, the company also uses the combination of other business strategies that aim ...