Starbucks: Leveraging on innovative mobile payments and social media.

Starbucks: Leveraging on innovative mobile payments and social media
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Starbucks: Leveraging on innovative mobile payments and social media
Starbucks Corporation, an American company, is the largest coffee company in the world. It primarily deals in coffee. However, it offers a host of other products such as snacks, beers and wines in the evening, as well as pastries. The company was founded in 1971 and has since grown and expanded to the global presence it commands today. Starbucks is renowned for its aggressive marketing strategies that the company has been engaging itself in to establish its brand globally. In recent times, however, Starbucks has faced major challenges in the form of coffee bean prices plunging. This plunge had a major effect on the prices of coffee with competitors finding a way in to compete with Starbucks by offering lower prices for their coffee. The Starbucks marketing strategy has often relied on lower prices for high-quality coffee to drive out the competition, especially from the smaller players.
Starbucks faces a number of challenges. Though the company’s brand is still the best, competition from other coffee companies, its fast growth in recent years and a, hitherto, dormant marketing strategy, as well as as refusal to do franchising that is a well known cost cutting strategy during rapid expansion and development phases. The company introduced a mobile payment criteria with which customers have been making payments.

The mobile payment solution has been instrumental in helping increase sales in recent years, though the use of the mobile solutions can be utilized further to increase the sales opportunities and in facilitating the rapid growth plans. This research paper seeks to examine the role social media and mobile payments can play in the rapid growth expansion plans currently being undertaken by Starbucks Corporation.
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