First of all i think Starbucks should protect its biggest core competence, the well known brand image. The company should invest the 40 million dollars to improve or maintain the quality of the service by increasing the labor hours per shop, because it is one of the major values of the shops (and an increase of 1,2 percent in total sales covers this). To keep the high positioning of the brand (because most of the profit comes from consumers who are visiting often the shops and really care about the image) Starbucks should sell its coffee only to Starbucks retail locations, approved corporate partners, specialty coffee retailers and high quality hotels and restaurants. Partnerships for extending the brand should be reputable companies and for premium products only. Starbucks needs to take measures to safeguard their brand image and prevent the image from being cheapened.
Starbucks should decrease its expenses as well; the easiest way for that seem to be the lowering of the – already high – labour cost. To make it reasonable, the productivity should be increased by investing in automated machines and making less waste, or simplify the coffe selection. The company should give more selection of coffe beans and foods to the customer, because its sales are weak in this segments, and it can be assumed that many of the customers would eat during having coffe (for example in the morning while buying a coffee for the office or in lunch time), and/or if they cannot go to the shop they would like to have the same kind of coffee at home as well.
The company is facing a serious problem: How can Starbucks increase the consumer satisfaction (and the sales with that) while growing at the same time? To manage to grow, to work on the data coming from the measurements and increase th ...