The story of Starbucks and the new CEO, Brian Niccol, continues to be a frothy beverage! I believe that turning around Starbucks starts with asking the “What Sucks?” question and focusing on the brand promise for Starbucks, and then aligning everything to that brand promise.
I was interviewed by Peter Green at Quartz for his feature piece on this challenge.
“The mistake Narasimhan made, and I have concerns that Brian Niccol is already making it, is he took Howard Schultz’s plan and he ran with it,” Rossman said in an interview. “Niccol has to tear up that plan and say, ‘this is a reset.’” Niccol needs to tell Schultz, the board, and the activist shareholders that a turnaround will take time, Rossman added.
“The major thing is to just dial back on efficiency. That would improve the customer experience and the employee experience,” Rossman said. Starbucks’ thousands of possible combinations of coffees, syrups, milks, and foam styles, and the push for app-ordered takeout coffees, have changed the company’s value proposition. “It used to be they’d have your name on a cup,” noted Rossman (even if it was misspelled). “Now you’re just a bar code.”
To get there, he said, Niccol should define “what sucks” at Starbucks. “If you can focus on the critical challenge in the business, which all the little things add up to, you have a chance to get to the root cause of the problem, and then develop a strategy to fix it,” Rossman said.
Read HERE