Wake Up and Smell STARBUCKS!

     Starbucks Corporation, doing business as Starbucks Coffee, is an American global coffee company and coffeehouse chain based in Seattle, Washington. It is the largest coffeehouse company in the world, with 23,187 stores in 64 countries. Their products are: roasted and handcrafted high-quality, premium priced coffees, tea, fresh food items and other beverages. They also sell coffee and tea products and license their trademarks through channels such as licensed stores, groceries etc.

     Starbucks primarily operates and competes in the retail coffee and snacks store industry. The core competence of Starbucks has been its ability to effectively leverage its cornerstone product differentiation strategies by offering a premium product mix of high quality beverages and snacks. Their brand equity is built on selling the finest quality coffee and related products, and by giving each customer a unique “Starbucks Experience”, which is supreme customer service, clean and well-maintained stores, thus building a high degree of customer loyalty.

     Its other core competence is its human resource management's values-based approach for building very strong internal and external relationships with suppliers, which drives the successful deployment of its business strategy of expansion into international markets, horizontal integration through smart acquisitions and alliances that maintains their long-term strategic objective being the most recognized and respected brands in the world.

     Starbucks, with its size and scale, has the power to take advantage of its suppliers but under its coffee and farmer equity program, it gives its suppliers a fair partnership status, which gives them moderately, low power. The suppliers in the industry also pose a low threat of competing against Starbucks by forward vertical integration, which lowers their power. Starbucks also forms a highly important part of the suppliers business, due its size and scope, which make the power of the suppliers lower. Thus, suppliers pose a moderately low bargaining power.

Starbucks Founder Howard Schultz

     Starbucks has a significant geographical presence across the globe, maintains a 36.7% market share in the United States and operates in over 60 countries. It is the most recognized brand in the coffeehouse segment and is ranked 91st in the best global brands of 2013. Starbucks effectively leverages its rich brand equity by merchandizing products, licensing its brand logo. Such strong market position and brand recognition allows the company to gain significant competitive advantage in further expanding into international markets and also register higher growth in both domestic and international markets.

     They give the highest importance to the quality of their products and avoid standardization even for higher production output. Starbucks has stores in some of the most prime and strategic locations across the globe. They target premium, high-traffic and high-visibility locations which has earned them a significant competence and advantage to be able to penetrate prime markets. Their stores are visually appealing, being designed to reflect the unique character of the neighbourhood they serve in and environmentally friendly. They provide free Wi-Fi, great music, great service, warm atmosphere and an environment of community meeting, which forms a wider part of the ‘Starbucks Experience’. The main aim here is to make their stores a ‘third place’ besides home and work.

     Starbucks is known for its employees. They are the main assets of the company and they are provided with great benefits like stock option, retirement accounts and a healthy culture. Thus, the effective management of its human resources translates into great customer service. Their stores are community friendly, by recycling and reducing waste, thereby building goodwill among communities where they operate.

     Just as Apple did with iTunes, Starbucks efficiently leverages technology with its mobile application ‘Starbucks App’ in both iOS and Android. They make significant investments in technology to support their growth every year. It has a cult following status among consumers and they have also implemented loyalty-based programs to drive loyalty with the Starbucks Rewards programs and Starbucks Card. The Starbucks Card is a value card program that provides convenience, support gifting, and increases the frequency of store visits by cardholders and integrated with their mobile application.

     The increasing saturation and of the US market makes its international strategy even more important. Starbucks has made an entry into many countries, with India recently joining the list with a joint venture. Starbucks sees a great growth potential in further expanding into emerging and developing markets. They leverage their size, experience, financial prowess and efficiencies. Starbucks recently started to expand their product mix by venturing into the Tea and fresh juice product offerings with a smart acquisition strategy.

 

     One of the key strategies that Starbucks followed since its inception is that of product differentiation with its premium product mix, locations, reputation in coffee beverages and supreme customer service that translated to building a premium valued brand that is costly to imitate for competitors. Starbucks also followed a shrewd strategy of strategic alliance and making smart acquisitions. Starbucks didn’t follow the franchising model and operated company oriented stores and joint ventures in international markets.

     Another crucial strategy for Starbucks’ growth has been expansion into key developed and emerging markets for geographical diversification, and it has been highly successful with operations spanning 64 countries. All these strategies have derived considerable competitive advantage for Starbucks over its competitors.

     Thus, Starbucks is an excellent example of spotting opportunities and making effective utilisation of the same. Their culture is thus that it can adapt to any environment which has helped them grow in so many markets. Efficient management of their human capital and their suppliers, their foray into technology and their supreme customer relationship management have ensured that Starbucks is here to play a long innings in the coffeehouse segment.

The Snapdeal Way: the story of identifying right business opportunities

With the evolution of e-commerce in India, the most talked about website has always been the market leader Flipkart. But doing equally well in terms of business and growing at a much faster rate is its competitor Snapdeal. A venture started by two twenty-four year old school friends, has indeed been a magnificently successful brand. They have played a major role in shaping the buying habits of today’s generation. They identified opportunities at every step, tweaked their line of business, diversified where they sensed high growth, made the best use of the funding they got from their investors and succeeded to be one of the biggest players of the Indian e-commerce industry.

Kunal Bahl, then 24 years of age, a management student from Wharton School of Business, decided to start a business with his school friend Rohit Bansal after a stint at Microsoft. Rohit, an IIT engineer was then working with CapitalOne. With a total work experience of 18 months between both of them, they quit their corporate lifestyle and decided to follow their childhood dreams. Life was easy and sorted for them; they had the best degrees and the best jobs with substantial packages. But they chose to go the hard way. That was the first time they spotted an opportunity. Indians are generally misers and they love to save money. They love to shop during monsoon sale, eat at restaurants that give discounts and prefer to buy the most cost-efficient car. So, basically Indians love discounts. This insight paved a path for the idea of a couponing and discounting business.

Snapdeal Co-founders: Kunal Bahl & Rohit Bansal

They launched MoneySaver, an offline couponing business in 2007. They were struggling at establishing this new idea and realized they had to seek investments. They started cold calling investors through their websites, as they weren’t sure who would be interested in investing in this kind of a business. IndoUS Venture Partners were their first investors in September 2009.

While their business was still juvenile, a couple of merchants working with them suggested that Kunal and Rohit could venture into the online market to carry their couponing business. This casual suggestion kept them thinking. Internet was still in its nascent stage in India. Online group buying deals were newly started by Groupon in the United States. It wasn’t a tested business and as the golden law persists, it is not necessary that a successful business at every corner of the world would be successful in India as well. So, there was a risk, but a bigger opportunity and the optimistic minds could not ignore it. They knew that they would get the first mover advantage to be pioneers in the online couponing and group buying deals segment. They brainstormed on how to go about it in January 2010. Soon after that, they registered a domain and that was all that the Engineer-MBA duo knew back then about an online business. On February 4, 2010 they took the brave plunge and launched Snapdeal.com under the company named ‘Jasper Infotech’. The site failed initially, and they made a lot of mistakes. But however, they were extremely agile, they obsessively tracked the customer preferences, and continued to rapidly revise and improve the platform. They evolved and learned from their mistakes and kept moving forward by taking intelligent risks and eventually things started working out well.

Snapdeal.com was started in February 2010 as a daily deals platform. They gave discounted deals on restaurants, beauty salons, spas, amusement parks and many other entertainment services. Various budding business happily collaborated with Snapdeal since the deals attracted customers and got them recognition. Soon, Snapdeal became a sensational success in the country. But they realized that the growth in the daily deals platform was slow and would get stagnant after a point. Ecommerce was a budding industry in India. It had already become popular in the developed countries. Websites like Ebay and Amazon had proved their mettle. In India, Flipkart had then just ventured into the ecommerce world and had got a decent response. The number of internet users in India was less, but the fact remained that the growth rate of internet in India was the highest.

This was spotted to be great opportunity by Kunal and Rohit. E-commerce was a risky industry since it was not easy to change Indian buying habits. But as it is said, big risk brings big money. Finally in September 2011, Snapdeal tweaked their line of business and became an e-commerce company via a marketplace model. The marketplace model is one in which the company does not own the inventory. It engages different retailers to sell their products. It had successfully been implemented by Ebay in the US. Flipkart on the other hand followed the Inventory-holding model of ecommerce, where in the company itself owned the entire inventory and sold it to its buyers. No other private retailers were involved. The move was fraught with risks at a time when most e-retailers in India were inventory-led, but going the marketplace way really jump-started Jasper Infotech, which runs Snapdeal.com, into the big league.

Today, Snapdeal locks horns with e-commerce biggie Flipkart and is nearing a billion dollars in sales. With 20 million registered users, Snapdeal is one of the first and largest online marketplaces in India offering an assortment of over 4 million products across diverse categories from over 20,000 sellers, shipping to 4,000 towns and cities in India. It has shown a phenomenal growth rate of 600% in the last one year.

From an offline couponing business to an e-commerce company nearing a billion dollar sales, the Snapdeal story narrates how young entrepreneurs can create new business opportunities and build a legacy.

Illusory Universe

What is the size of the universe? Where does it begin? Where does it end? What exists after the universe’s end?

What if this universe was the brain of God? And our sun was one of the many billion nuclei in it? They say our earth was formed after the collision of two stars. What if there was a collision between two atoms in the brain of God and earth revolves around the sun like an electron around the nucleus? If this is so, we will never be able to see the face of God because we are right inside that extra-terrestrial being called God.  Universe is full of possibilities and very mysterious. It’s nearly impossible to guess how huge the universe is. And considering its size, we humans are a negligible ‘nobody’.  We are not even a small fraction of a particle of the universe. The realization of being so tiny and minute only makes us feel ‘invisible’. Or are we just a part of someone’s imagination or visualization? After all, don’t we say, ‘’It’s all in the head”?

From the cradle of sadists

  

Drifting into the sea of perversion

This world I know is a place for hypocrites

Purity of the souls fading away

And the conscience is getting tainted

Cruelty showing no remorse

Empathy crushed down to zero

Blood smeared deals being carried out fearlessly

On the pile of dead bodies

This is the voice from the cradle of sadists

Leave humanity behind

Or get ready to be perished

5 things to consider while purchasing your next smartphone.

Almost a decade ago when mobile phones entered the consumer market and gradually emerged to become a mundane accessory, it was not that difficult to select your model. There were very few brands and even fewer features to offer. But now, there are smartphones and they are getting smarter every day..! The question is, are you smart enough to select a phone that suits you best? In today’s world where there is a new smartphone coming up every month and there is so much it offers, what exactly should you be looking for? Here are some tips that should help you while selecting a smartphone.

1. Display

There has been a trend of increasing screen size since the introduction of smartphones. The screen size kept on increasing which led to the introduction of tablets and later on compelled phones to become phablets. But while considering the Display, it’s not just the screen size that matters; rather Resolution plays a much more important role. Some common resolutions are VGA (640x480), WVGA (800x480), HD (1280x720), Full HD (1920x1080) and so on. The number of pixels packed up together per sq. inch defines the pixel density PPI (pixels per inch). This PPI is responsible for the crispness and sharpness of the display. A big screen with lower resolution will lead to lower PPI of around 200; where as a decent screen with high resolution will produce a dense PPI of around 300-400. So you should look for a dense PPI so that the quality of display is good. Phones with lower resolutions may not be able to play HD videos or HD apps.