Cappuccino Wars: The Battle for the High Street
51Due英国论文代写网精选assignment代写范文:“Cappuccino Wars: The Battle for the High Street”，这篇论文主要描述的是咖啡在英国经历了悠久的发展历程，人们不断的研发出浓缩咖啡、摩卡咖啡、白咖啡、拿铁咖啡、卡布奇诺等等品类繁多的咖啡，近年来英国的咖啡市场竞争愈发激烈，大量的咖啡酒吧、咖啡厅、咖啡店面出现在英国大街上，提供着三明治和有热量的食物和咖啡供顾客选择，互相之间的竞争导致人们开始重新对咖啡进行定位，是单纯的咖啡店还是一间熟食店。
The UK has come a long way from the days when a request for coffee would bring a cup of uniformly grey, unappealing liquid, sometimes served in polystyrene cups, which bore no relation to the rich, flavoursome coffee experienced on trips to continental Europe. The origin of this change was not Europe, however, but the USA, where the coffee bar culture was grounded.
Recent years have seen an explosion of coffee bars on UK high streets, with over 5 million lattes, cappuccinos and espressos served per week. The market is dominated by the US-owned Starbucks, with over 800 coffee bars, Costa coffee (backed by Whitbread), with over 800, and an independent, Caffe Nero, with around 360 bars. A fourth competitor, Coffee Republic, has closed and sold shops to its rivals in the face of mounting losses. It has repositioned many of its coffee shops to become delicatessens, offering sandwiches and hot food as well as coffee. In total, the UK has over 3000 coffee shops, all charging over £2 for a small coffee. Often three or more bars will be located within 100 yards of each other.
The first US west coast-style coffee shop was opened in the UK in 1995 and was called the Seattle Coffee Company. The owners were Americans who saw an opportunity to serve the British with good-quality coffee in relaxed surroundings just like they experienced in the USA. The concept was a huge success and by 1997 the company had 49 coffee outlets. It was joined by Coffee Republic and Caffe Nero, which also grew rapidly. But in 1997 the coffee market in the UK was to change dramatically with the arrival of the US-based Starbucks coffee bar giant, which bought the Seattle Coffee Company.http://www.51due.net/writing/more/sample5059.html
Its strategy was to gain market share through fast roll-out. For the first five years, Starbucks opened an average of five shops a month in the UK: in 1999 it had 95 shops, by 2009 this had increased to over 800. Today, Starbucks is in the Fortune Top 500 US companies and has nearly 15,000 coffee shops in more than 40 countries. Its approach is simple: blanket an area completely, even if the shops cannibalize one another’s business. A new coffee bar will often capture about 30 per cent of the sales of a nearby Starbucks, but the company considered this was more than offset by lower delivery and management costs (per shop), shorter queues at individual shops and increased foot traffic for all the shops in an area as new shops take custom from competitors too. Twenty million people buy coffee at Starbucks every week, with the average Starbucks customer visiting 18 times a month.
One of its traditional strengths was the quality of its coffee. Starbucks has its own roasting plant, from which the media are banned lest its secrets are revealed. In its coffee shops, coffee is mixed with a lot of milk and offered in hundreds of flavours. Its Frappuccino is positioned as a midday break in advertisements where a narrator explains ‘Starbucks Frappuccino coffee drink is a delicious blend of coffee and milk to smooth out your day.’ The tag-line is ‘Smooth out your day, everyday.’
A key problem is that Starbucks’ major competitors – Costa Coffee and Caffe Nero – have also followed a fast roll-out strategy causing rental prices to spiral upwards. For example, Starbucks’ Leicester Square coffee shop in London was part of a £1.5 million two-shop rental deal. Many coffee shops are not profitable and, with Starbucks continuing to operate them, it has been accused of unfairly trying to squeeze out the competition. Nevertheless, after sustaining losses in the early years all three major players are now profitable.
The typical consumer at these coffee bars is young, single and a high earner. They are likely to be professionals, and senior or middle managers with company cars. Students are also an important part of the market. Coffee bars are seen as a ‘little bit of heaven’, a refuge where consumers can lounge on sofas, read broadsheet newspapers and view new age poetry on the walls. They provide an oasis of calm for people between their homes and their offices. They are regarded as a sign of social mobility for people who may be moving out of an ordinary café or low-end department store into something more classy. Even the language is important for these consumers, where terms such as latte, cappuccino and espresso allow them to demonstrate connoisseurship.
Coffee bars also cater for the different moods of consumers. For example, Sahar Hashemi, a founding partner of Coffee Republic explains, ‘If I’m in my routine, I’ll have a tall skinny latte. But if I’m feeling in a celebratory mood or like spoiling myself, it’s a grand vanilla mocha with whip and marshmallows.’
Starbucks has expanded the services it provides by offering a WiFi service that allows laptop and personal digital assistant users to gain high-speed Internet access. In the USA it has introduced an in-store music service in 45 of its shops, which allows customers to listen to a selection from 250,000 tracks. They can then order the tracks they like, have them burnt onto a CD in the shop and buy them when they leave. It has also struck deals to distribute CDs at its stores by artists including Paul McCartney and Joni Mitchell.
While Coffee Republic has made a major move towards becoming a delicatessen, Starbucks, Costa Coffee and Caffe Nero also offer food alongside drinks. Starbucks targets breakfast, lunch and snack times with a limited range of both indulgent and healthy eating options. Costa Coffee has been offering hot foods and salads since 2002. Caffe Nero’s food offer is integral to its Italian-style positioning, with most of the ingredients for its meals coming from Italy.
The chains have also embraced the fair trade coffee idea, with Costa Coffee offering Cafedirect products since 2000 and Starbucks introducing fair trade coffee in 2002. Starbucks has also met with considerable success for its low-calorie version of its Frappuccino iced drinks.
The recent recession has hit all chains, but Starbucks, in particular, has suffered. Declining performance led to the reappointment in 2008 of Howard Schultz as chief executive, the man who grew the firm from just four outlets to nearly 15,000 today. He identified Starbucks’ problems as stemming from its outlets losing their ‘romance and theatre’. He pointed out that the distinctive aroma of fresh coffee was less evident because of the advent of vacuum-sealed, flavour-locked packaging. Also the use of new automated machines meant customers could not see their drinks being prepared – eliminating an ‘intimate experience’ with the barista and impairing the spectacle of coffee making. The result, he concluded, was that some customers found Starbucks coffee shops sterile places that no longer reflected a passion for coffee. The situation was made worse by the smell of sandwiches, which often overpowered the aroma of coffee. Some Starbucks staff were also criticized for being unfriendly.
The problems facing Starbucks were worsened by a strong challenge from McDonald’s, which have opened ‘McCafes’ in some of their outlets where customers can buy similar drinks to Starbucks’ at a cheaper price. Starbucks’ woes continued with a report from the consumer magazine Which?, which showed that Starbucks’ coffee was inferior to that sold at Costa Coffee and Café Nero, which topped the survey. It was also the most expensive.
Mr Schultz has begun to address some of these problems by introducing new, smaller espresso machines so customers can once again see the baristas making their drink. Coffee is once again being ground by hand, restoring the aroma, and a less potent cheese is being used in sandwiches. The baristas have also been retrained, not only in the art of making excellent coffee, but also in connecting better with customers. The interiors of many of the company’s coffee shops are being renovated. Stores in the USA have been closed and expansion of the chain abroad has been slowed as management realize that the market is saturated.
To make outlets more attractive during the recession, a new instant coffee brand, Via, was launched which Starbucks claims tastes as good as ground coffee but at a much cheaper price. The company has also introduced a loyalty card, which allows for free extras such as a shot of whipped cream, syrup or soy in the coffee.
51Due作为专业的留学教育辅导机构，专业辅导essay 代写 assignment代写 paper代写 论文代写，自2004年至今，坚持以学生为中心，全天候服务，为海外留学生完成了数万篇以上的论文，以优质的英国代写服务赢得留学生的信赖，有代写需求，可以咨询Q800020041哦。
51Due网站原创范文除特殊说明外一切图文著作权归51Due所有；未经51Due官方授权谢绝任何用途转载或刊发于媒体。如发生侵犯著作权现象，51Due保留一切法律追诉权。-xz
