What Starbucks Essentially Stands For :

"I wanted to blend coffee with romance, to dare to achieve what others said was impossible, to defy the odds with innovative ideas and to do all that with elegance and style"

High Quality Whole Bean Coffee Dark Roasted to Perfection

The numero uno responsibility of Starbucks, as they felt, was to bring the highest quality whole bean coffee to people and that the beans should be dark roasted to perfection. Starbucks holds it as a part of their policy that they will not, at any cost, compromise with the quality of the beans used and will avoid tampering with the authenticity of beans. By tampering I mean bringing in artificially flavoured coffee beans. For many customers who enjoy a nice hazelnut brew, they have often asked Starbucks to sell Hazelnut Flavoured Coffee beans, but Starbucks held its ground. It is ready to use Hazelnut syrup after the raw brew is done, but it will never bring in chemicals to the whole beans. Even when Starbucks was hit by the rising price of coffee, the idea of mixing high quality beans with that of a lower quality never struck them, because compromising with the quality would go against their values, and even if the initial round of customers wouldn't realise the variance, they themselves would know the difference, and would be ashamed in their own eyes. I guess for a company which has also ventured itself into avenues from just pure espresso based drinks, it is important that they hold on to certain grass root level principles. 

No Franchisee

In fact, due to their obsession for quality, they refused to have any franchisees! Having a franchisee would mean that they cannot keep a strict watch over their quality, and if the franchisee didn't take care of the quality of their beans, of their merchandise, of their top class ambiance and service, the brand itself would falter and that is something Howard Schultz was absolutely dead against. Starbucks controlled their own distributions so that they weren't under the mercy of retailers who did not understand their product. In fact most of the Starbucks stores that you see are owned by Starbucks themselves and very few are by Starbucks Partners. They have a rigorous procedure for selecting Starbucks partners which I have later described in this essay.

Educating People About Coffee

Starbucks has long held a passion of educating people about Coffee. That was the reason why they started Starbucks in the first place right? They taught Americans what good coffee is. Took them out of their days of horrible Robusta and supermarket aisles and introduced them to the finer pleasures of coffee. This is primarily because Starbucks gets their coffee beans from different parts of the world. They get it from Sumatra, Kenya, Ethiopia, Costa Rica and several other places. So how would a customer, who is going to buy coffee by the bag, know the difference between coffee from Sumatra and that from Kenya? You need to tell them the difference, tell  them why they are different, tell them about the flavour profiles and tell them which coffee will give them what they want. Starbucks wanted people to know about the coffee they were serving them. After all coffee is not just a coloured beverage, right. They can't taste the same. When even the water tastes different in different parts of the world, how does one expect coffee, that is grown on different kinds of soil and in myriad climates, taste the same? So they made sure that their baristas were very well trained and apart from making people more informed about the coffee from their baristas, Starbucks decided to make stamps indicating a local specialty from the region where the coffee has come from to give people a lingering feel about the region the coffee represents. These stamps were designed with great care to make people not forget what they learnt from Starbucks. 

Design - Elegance and Style

Talking of the stamps and their design, brings me to the topic of design in relation to Starbucks. Howard Schultz was meticulous about every design aspect of Starbucks, right from their store design, to logo design, to their to-go cup design and even their coffee bag design. He keeps emphasizing the need for being elegant and stylish in everything. He believes that is what sets Starbucks apart from any other coffee retailer or cafe. For every store opened in a new neighbourhood, in a new city, in a new country, he wanted the Starbucks store to retain its signature style of wooden decor with  a mild Italian Coffee Bar vibe mingled with the culture of the new space they were opening in. The store ambiance had to be a perfect balance between the elegance Starbucks stood for and the culture of the locality they were situated in, because they didn't want to lose their Starbucks touch and neither did they want their customers to feel that they had entered an alien store. 

Starbucks is one of the few companies who can boast of an in-house design team, an in-house marketing team and an in-house team of architectures. Howard goes onto define the kind of work each team did, and even talks about the new automated systems their architects came up with to reduce cost and make the matter of incorporating the signature Starbucks style a seamless process. He was picky even about using styrofoam cups as to-go cups and they never made the move from paper to plastic. Their in-house R&D team is still working on making a more eco-friendly option, even though they try to recycle their cups as much as possible.

Apart from Howard's crazy obsession for maintaining quality, he had a crazy obsession for elegance and style that should be reflected from every molecule that went into building the Starbucks brand. 

Coffee Is A Romantic Affair And The Quest For A Third Place

For Howard, drinking coffee is a romantic affair. He wanted people to come to Starbucks and enjoy. His philosophy was, if a person cannot afford a trip to Hawaii, he should be able to come to Starbucks and be transported to a land elsewhere. 

The moment one would walk in through the doors of Starbucks, he would be greeted by a waft of dark roasted coffee beans. They would go to the barista, who would greet him with a smile and be enlightened about the different espresso based drinks that are available and why they are different. He will order a cup of excellent coffee, made from the finest beans. And while we would wait for his cup to arrive, he would soak in the immaculate style of his surroundings and enjoy the great music that would be playing in the background (Starbucks played great Blues and Jazz numbers, and people loved their song selection so much that they even had a brief successful stint of producing a collection of Blues CDs). When his coffee would arrive, his taste buds would be subjected to an elegant smooth velvety coffee and he would be able to sit down, and have a relaxed and joyful conversation with other people in the store or with his companion. - This was Howard's dream and this is what he built. 

Howard clearly specifies that he wants his stores to be a Third Place. For every being the First Place is their home and the Second Place their office. The Third Place is somewhere that is warm, welcoming, where people can come and relax and enjoy themselves.