Introduction
Costa Coffee is a leading coffee brand in the UK. This company delivers exceptional quality of products because of effective marketing approaches and innovative solutions in production. Still, if Costa Coffee delivers low quality products it would lead to decreased revenue, decreased number of repeat users and termination of relations with partners. Quality influences all areas the company operates in. Areas in which the firm’s value performance is deficient need to be targeted for improvement, focusing resources where most effective. Designing for producibility so as to achieve a cost reduction through a coordinated effort between R&D and manufacturing; analyzing and addressing the environmental impact of the firm’s product, processes and philosophy, and reducing set up times to improve volume flexibility are some of the actions that suggest themselves. Customer inputs would be invaluable in assessing, at the very least, how capably the firm meets their important needs (Crosby, 2005).
Main body
Poor quality of products would lead to decreased number of buyers/ Corporations could, within reason, reap the benefits of emulating nature. Pursuing a single-minded strategy of delivering and enhancing value to customers in a given product through continuous and rapid adaptation to customer needs could prove successful if the external environment does not turn nasty. The extreme uncertainty that prevails in many business environments and the possibility of rapid, unforeseeable change makes diversification, the equivalent of variation, an attractive course of action. After all, in business managers often create parts of our environment, customers being an example, which is rare in the ecological context. In fact, the concept of a customer, or the lack thereof, clouds many analogies of business to the natural sciences unless one views the customer as our entire planet, for whose overall benefit all species exist and compete. However, as long as firms stay within the confines of an environment, part or all of which is familiar to them, providing product variations and responding to changing demands, the ecological model appears to be a fairly sound parallel. Undoubtedly, customer needs must be discovered and fulfilled (Costa Coffee Home Page 2010’ Feigenbaum, 2004).
Poor quality would have a negative impact on brand image and relations with partners. It could damage company’s international reputation and recognition. Firms that try to deliver value in different countries with little or no attempt to build on value capabilities previously accumulated elsewhere are, in effect, like conglomerates whose different products have no conscious value relationship to one another. And just as conglomerates, so to speak, devalue a firm’s mission to its customers, multidomestic firms do not take advantage of potentially significant sources of value. Sharing and thus multiplying value are ignored in both types of organization. In a corporation-wide sense, value maximization results from employing a diversity of methods. The basic notion of determining and fulfilling customer needs, while seeking continuously to improve upon past achievements, is the bedrock upon which customer value rests (Manno and Kehoe, 2005; Costa Book Awards, 2010).
Conclusion
In sum, for companies like Costa Coffee quality is the core of success. The stages of the value creation process must be both separately and collectively attuned to the needs of customers. Concentrating on a single product and market segment and seeking to continuously enhance value delivered by improving worth and/or reducing cost is a perfectly viable strategy until opportunities arise to expand the firm’s scale/scope of operations or threats to its limited domain develop. As we have seen, various diversification strategies open up to allow the firm to transfer its value basis to new businesses, through internal development or acquisition, by entering into joint ventures, establishing a globally integrated firm with windows of responsiveness, and so on.
References
Costa Coffee Home Page. (2010). Web.
Costa Book Awards. (2010).
Crosby, P.B. (2005). Quality Without Tears. New York, McGraw-Hill, Inc.
Manno, B.G., Kehoe, J.J. (2005). Managing Quality. Philip Allan, New York, USA
Feigenbaum, A.V. (2004). Total Quality Control. McGraw-Hill, 3rd edition, New York, USA.