A Comparative Study of Coffee Marketing Strategies Taking Starbucks and Luckin Coffee as Examples

Abstract

Coffee is becoming more and more popular due to the influence of a series of factors, such as economic level, cultural life, social activities, and so on. Therefore, the coffee industry is becoming more competitive in China. In order to get more market share, the coffee company uses different marketing strategies. Among those strategies, co-branding has become a very popular marketing strategy in recent years, and a lot of research has proven its effectiveness. In this paper, there will be a discussion about the different views of Starbucks and Luckin Coffee, which are two very famous coffee companies in China, on the marketing strategy of co-branding based on available research papers. The article will use market segmentation, product value, and a customer journey map to analyze why Starbucks and Luckin Coffee have different opinions about co-branding. The result of the analysis in this paper suggests that because Starbucks and Luckin Coffee have different market positions and other influence factors, the former does not focus on co-branding in its overall operation, while Luckin Coffee takes co-branding seriously. This paper provides some valuable suggestions for coffee companies on how to find accurate marketing strategies according to their characteristics and whether they could use co-branding in the Chinese coffee industry.