Starbucks's Use Of Big Data?

In the technology driven world we live in, it in inevitable that businesses today have access to vast amounts of data, which in previous times would have been unheard of. Today, many larger organsiations use “Big Data” in order to help them improve and expand their business. Big data is described as diverse, high-volume, high-velocity information assets that require new forms of processing to enable enhanced decision making, insight discovery, and process optimization, (Gartner Research: www.gartner.com). Big data is being exploited by more and more companies as its benefits are discovered. It allows organisations to make much more informed decisions, which involves less risk taking. Decisions which were previously based on guesswork can now

Starbucks was founded in Seattle, Washington in 1971 and today it operates in 23,768 locations worldwide. It is an extremely successful corporation that is continuing to grow and expand. Evercore research recently said that Starbucks is an attractive asset for investors because of its consistency of store growth, customer loyalty and demand. Just like many other large businesses today, Starbucks uses Big Data. Through its use of Big Data, Starbucks manages to have many shops in close proximity to each other. Starbucks has a loyalty program, My Starbuck Rewards, consisting of 6 million registered customers. With 25% of all transactions made by these customers, a huge amount of data is collected. Taking into account that Starbucks offers 87.000 possible drinking combinations across the globe, has almost 21.000 stores in 62 countries, has approximately 160.000 employees worldwide, serves almost 4 billion cups of coffee annually and had $ 13.3 billion net revenue in 2012, it may be clear that Starbucks creates a lot of data (www.cnbc.com, 6th April 2016). One of the benefits and oppurtunities of so much data combined with the large customer

Using consumer data, the coffee chain designed its new line of products to complement the habits it gleaned from its own stores. The company talked to its baristas about how customers ordered coffee, lattes and tea while in Starbucks locations and culled several industry reports about at-home consumption. It used that data to create K-Cups and bottled beverages to sell in grocery