Starbucks CEO’s 4-part strategy hinges on coffeehouse roots
Dive Brief:
- Brian Niccol said Starbucks will use a four-part strategy to return to its core identity, which he outlined in a letter addressed to workers and customers on Tuesday.
- This multipronged approach includes improving workers’ ability to serve customers and offering them opportunities for career advancement; focusing on the morning daypart; reestablishing the brand as a community coffeehouse; and asserting control over its brand narrative.
- Starbucks launched a reinvention plan in 2022 defined by similar rhetoric around workers and cafe experience, including pledges to make stores more community-oriented, neighborhood focal points.
Dive Insight:
The continuities between Niccol’s letter and previous plans by Starbucks leadership to improve the brand reflect how difficult it has been to resolve many of the company’s issues.
Niccol’s program placed emphasis on speed of service in the mornings, noting that it’s particularly important for the brand to succeed at “delivering outstanding drinks and food, on time, every time.”
Niccol said Starbucks has missed the mark on in-store experience.
“In some places — especially in the U.S. — we aren’t always delivering. It can feel transactional, menus can feel overwhelming, product is inconsistent, the wait too long or the handoff too hectic,” Niccol wrote.
The new CEO said those misses represent opportunities for improvement. The letter commits Starbucks to making its stores “inviting places to linger, with comfortable seating, thoughtful design and a clear distinction between “to-go” and “for-here” service.”
Niccol said the brand must recommit to its identity as a community coffeehouse that serves high-quality coffee.
In the United States, Niccol wrote, Starbucks will invest in technologies that enhance worker and consumer experience, improve its supply chain and change its app and mobile ordering platform. The letter did not include specific plans for these changes.
Starbucks has struggled for years with the volume of customized and cold beverages it sells, which prompted it to design the Siren System kitchen, which it is still in the process of rolling out. The company recently added a new role focused specifically on addressing order bottlenecks as part of broader efforts to streamline its drink-making process.
Niccol is focused on stabilizing the U.S. business, and he wrote that he would spend his first 100 days “in our stores and at our Support Centers, meeting with key partners and suppliers, and working with our team to drive these critical first steps.”
These moves are largely inline with the expectations of analysts and experts, who have predicted that Starbucks would have to focus on its coffee and its cafe experiences, and that marketing and brand image would be major early priorities for Niccol.
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