David Newlands

Case Study 2: Starbucks Philippines: Brewing a Filipino-American Experience

The Starbucks group is a premium coffee roaster and retailer. While travelling in Italy in 1983, Starbucks’ marketing director, Howard Shultz, visited a coffee house. Until this trip, the business model had been to sell roasting and grinding machines for home use. Shultz recognized people want coffee on the go and understood that Starbuck’s future lay in retailing gourmet coffee by the cup but with the unique blend of Italian elegance and American informality. Howard Schultz became president of Starbucks in 1987. He set about by recreating the brand’s image. The aim thereafter was rapid growth. Starting with 17 coffee shops in Seattle in 1987, the group has grown to over 21,000 outlets in 60 plus countries today. To achieve this internationalization, the company had to start to expand outside of the US. Their market penetration in North America had become significant. Faced with diminishing new market opportunities, the group decided to expand into the Asia-Pacific region. Starbucks’ former International President, Howard Behar, already had overseen the introduction of the brand in Japan and Singapore. Starbucks Coffee International opened in Philippines with a local licensee Rustan Coffee Corporation.

Case Study 7: Häagen-Dazs China: The Luxury Icing on the Cream

Haagen-Dazs is a brand that operates in the premium ice cream category and was the first explicitly to focus on adults rather than children. Reuben and Rose Mattus created the Haagen-Dazs brand of ice cream in 1961 in Brooklyn, NY. Since Denmark had a strong reputation for dairy products at that time, the name Haagen-Dazs was invented by the Mattuses composed of two made-up words that gave the brand Scandinavian mystique. The company began with just the three basic ice cream flavors—chocolate, vanilla and coffee. The company rapidly adopted the franchise model of business to grow exponentially throughout the 1970s. This enabled the corporation to multiply the number of flavors and expand the portfolio of retail outlets without the capital investment or risk. Since then, ownership of Haagen-Dazs Company has changed several times. The company was first acquired by Pillsbury in 1983, and then by General Mills when it acquired Pillsbury in 2001.