Inside Starbucks' GIS Strategy

By Erin Harris, Integrated Solutions For Retailers magazine

Starbucks Coffee Company (Starbucks), which celebrates its 40th anniversary this year, is one of the most pervasive companies in all of retail. Indeed, you can visit a Starbucks brick-and-mortar store or enjoy Starbucks products in places such as airports, hotels, or convention centers with extreme ease. According to Starbucks' 2009 fiscal report, the java juggernaut operates 16,635 stores in the United States and generated $9.8B in revenue. To answer many of the questions Starbucks has when evaluating a market, Patrick O'Hagan, manager of global market planning at Starbucks, and his team rely on GIS mapping software to perform advanced analytics, business intelligence (BI), and geospacial intelligence for Starbucks' real estate partners. In addition, those same real estate partners operate a Web-based GIS solution, which simplifies access to GIS services and provides geographic knowledge for mobile workers without any GIS experience. So, how does a company like Starbucks leverage a GIS solution to continuously build fresh go-to-market strategies?