Starbucks Mission: Social Responsibility and Brand Strength

Starbucks Mission: Social Responsibility and Brand Strength

Starbucks is a company that has had many ups a few downs since it was founded in 1971. In the beginning, the reputation that Starbucks made for itself is that Starbucks focused so much time, energy and money on gaining a profit; that maybe they lost sight of their mission for a while. It did seem like there was a Starbuck’s on just about every corner in cities throughout the country for a long while. With the criticisms coming from many directions regarding the number of stores, and the fact that Starbucks was putting many other smaller coffee shops out of business, I think that Starbucks’ Director of Retail Operations and Marketing, later Chairman, President and CEO, Howard Schultz (Ferrell, Fraedrich, Ferrell, 2011) had to take a step back and look at the original mission of Starbucks. Even though Starbucks has always supported responsible business practices since inception, it was time to get back to the basics and take a look at the effort that they were putting forth towards being a socially responsible organization. Additional criticisms such as lack of fair trade coffee, and the concern over the amount of Starbucks cups filling up landfills (Ferrell, Fraedrich, Ferrell, 2011), I believe, has led to the change in the direction of the company. In 1999, the company created a Corporate Social Responsibility Department, later turned into the Global Responsibility Department (Ferrell, Fraedrich, Ferrell, 2011) which now releases an annual report which allows the stakeholders to keep track of Starbucks performance. The recession was the icing on the cake for the changes and the re-focus toward social responsibility. With the sudden focus of Americans being on protecting their income and investments, Starbucks then had to change their image in order to re-gain the interest of their patrons.

As I look at the Starbucks website, I see that they try to focus on this “new” image and leave much...