In This report I will discuss and analyse the purpose of marketing within Starbucks in order to secure a budget increase for the Starbucks marketing department. In this report I will include the purpose of marketing, market planning, market research methods, market segmentation, targeting and positioning.

A company has aims and objectives, this may be a corporate objective such as “improving profitability by 10% over the next 2 years” or general goals within the organisation. Marketing in a business is one of the keys to unlocking these goals.
Marketing is a very complex and ambiguous topic,
“Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large” This is a definition from the American Marketing Association.
One of Starbucks corporate aim was “Starbucks aims to double market cap to $100 billion and take over tea market”
The marketing section of a business needs to work closely with human resources, research and development, operations to check their plans are possible. Operations will need to use sales estimates created by the marketing department to and plan their production schedules. Sales forecasts will also be an important part of the budgets produced by the finance department, as well as the placement of workforce for the HR department. The R&D department will need to work carefully with marketing to understand the requirements of the customers.

The purpose of marketing is understanding what makes customers buy a product a business is trying to sell. Marketing is often defined as:
“The process of identifying, predicting and satisfying customer needs profitably”
These words taken individually define the characteristics of marketing, identifying is when research is done on an existing product, and the opportunity of new products coming into the market. Predicting is when the research is given to the managers, then try to predict how the product may affect the current market. This makes it easier for companies to update and adapt their products to meet customer expectations. This also helps customer needs, the products will be fit for the customer plus they will be happy and satisfied. In addition they will not complain and be happy to purchase the product again. In all of this the costs will be high, so the products should be sold at an added value leaving a surplus, which may lead to an increase in profits.

Marketing planning is a plan to help a company to attain a corporate objective or targets. The corporate aims and objectives refer to what the business wishes to achieve in the future. The main objective is very important, this will allow the business stay and track, otherwise the business runs the risk of being distracted from what it originally set out to achieve. The marketing plan consists of internal and external forms of analysis: PEST analysis, SWOT analysis, SMART objectives and Porters 5 Forces.

SWOT analysis stands from Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.
For example a business like Starbucks is likely to identify its Brand name as a strength, whereas they may consider their fixed costs to be a weakness, due to import/export costs changing. Considering these internal factors will help a business to identify which features to focus on when making their marketing plan.

PEST analysis encourages businesses to consider the political, economic, social and technological factors when constructing a marketing plan. If the inflation rate increases this is an economic factor which must be considered, especially when it comes to pricing decisions.
The other political imperative that Starbucks faces is the need to adhere to the laws and regulations in the countries from where it sources its raw materials. This has been necessitated because of activism and increased political awareness in the developing countries, which form the