Starbucks Case Study Only thirty years ago the Starbucks Coffee Company was a mere small town coffee shop located in Seattle, Washington. Howard Schultz, then a young entrepreneur, was fond of the coffee shop and aspired to build the company into the giant franchise that it is today after being inspired by a trip to Italy. Starbucks has become one of the biggest coffee restaurants in the world and has become a household word. The Starbucks brand provided its customers with gourmet coffees, espresso’s, and lattes and a specialized environment that gave customers a place to enjoy their Starbucks products. Initially, Starbucks Coffee Company segmented and targeted the coffee market by geographic location. Starbucks CEO, Schultz, achieved such success with expanding the small town coffee shop that over the initial course of twenty years, the franchise went from consisting of only a few small venues to having almost seventeen thousand stores with locations in dozens of countries around the world. Schultz had great ambition to open over ten thousand more stores over the course of the next four years and then set on to his next goal – which was to open an additional forty thousand stores. With so much success happening so quickly, the market for Starbucks eventually began to slow and even reverse. The company had to reanalyze the way it did business if it wanted to survive and maintain its identity. Rapid expansion and overwhelming popularity, the experience the customers once got from the company no longer existed. The Starbucks experience changed, and then its customers changed. Business became less intimate and more rushed and Starbucks began to struggle to maintain its identity in its respect to its target customers – which was essentially highly educated Caucasian females with ages ranging between their mid-twenties to their mid-forties. Where previously, the