Macroeconomic Factors Affecting Starbucks

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Political

• Growing demand and supply shortage has increased world coffee prices.
• Favorable advantage to accessing raw material through supplier relationships.
• Fair-trade practices include its Coffee and Farmers Equity (C.A.F.E.) program among other fair trade policies and agreements.
Starbucks adheres to local, national and international government laws and policies and tightly control labour practices, avoiding scrutiny and negative imagery from being a large corporation. Economic

• High industry sensitivity to the macroeconomic factors affecting disposable income, a main industry driver. Also impacting per capita coffee consumption, another industry driver.
• Consumers switching to competing lower priced substitutes or …show more content…

The industry size and consumers needs are impacted by social or customer related factors (Contributor, 2015). The main customer related factors affecting Starbucks and its competitors include, economic conditions and customer attitudes, specifically towards Lifestyle and Taste.

One of the main demand drivers in the Industry is disposable income, which is significantly influenced by economic conditions. Positive economic conditions increase industry demand and per capita coffee consumption.

The Industry demand has changed due to a shift in consumers’ attitudes towards healthier products. This placed Starbucks’ coffee culture at risk and threatened the company’s future. Starbucks has tailored their menu to include more organic and healthy product mixes, venturing into tea, bread and fresh juice products (Geereddy, n.d).

Starbucks’ cornerstone product differentiation strategies and Human Resource Management are the main impacts to strategy formulation. Starbucks’ is a premium valued brand; costly to imitate. Its human capital deploys it operations and provide supreme customer support (Geereddy, n.d.), while organizational direction and culture is impacted by leadership (Kokemuller,