Good article from the New York Times.
Summary
Starbucks China is losing customers at a very rapid pace. Starbucks corporate executives are angry. Brian Niccol, the new $100 million CEO of Starbucks, sounded the alarm in October, calling the competition “extreme”. For the Chinese Lunar year, Starbucks released a pork flavor latte. It cost more than $9 and was widely seen as a disaster.
Billionaire Howard Schultz, Starbucks’s former CEO, insisted that Starbucks would not enter a price war in China. He claimed “as chinese customers become more knowledgeable about coffee, they will want to upgrade from lower-end or discounted products”
Starbucks positions itself internationally as an ultra premium brand. I remember visiting one in Thailand and being astounded that the prices were the same as the USA, just converted to bhat. This meant that a single drink could cost like half a day’s wages for a poor Thai person. I imagine the situation in China used to be similar before wages and purchasing power caught up. Now that consumers in China know enough about coffee to tell that Starbucks is crap, they won’t pay American prices for it any more, and it’s got Starbucks sweating.
And Fosters positioned itself as a premium import beer when the real reason they sold it here was no one in Australia would touch the stuff
Marketing is lying and we shouldn’t let them get away with it by calling it positioning
They sell it as a premium product in the US? That is funny.
Hmm, it was less a ‘premium’ and more it was selling the rough, laid back, no bullshit lifestyle as presented by Paul Hogan in Crocodile Dundee
So it wasn’t really marketed as a ‘quality’ beer as much as a personality accessory
Most of the world jokes about American beer being basically water and they aren’t wrong, but man Fosters has even less body than coors light
deleted by creator