During the company’s 2015 annual meeting of Shareholders Conference on March 20, Starbucks Chairman, President, and CEO Howard Schultz acknowledged that the iconic brand appeared on Fortune magazine’s list of most admired companies for the 13th consecutive year. The only problem?
Starbucks ranked fifth on the list. As much as Starbucks is admired worldwide, Schultz wants enough brand loyalty to move that ranking to No. 1.
“I was kind of disappointed with that to be honest with you,” Schultz said, according to Seeking Alpha. “And the truth is that I know the leadership team that you will meet in a little while and most all of us at Starbucks aspire to be No. 1, to become the most admired, recognized, and respected brand in the world. And the question is how are we going to that? And if you go back to the history of the company to the very early days, we had an unusual business proposition and we said to all of our leaders, all of our managers then and now, that if we want to exceed the expectations of our customers, then as managers and leaders we need to first exceed the expectations of our people.”
Schultz said the overriding message during the March 20 Shareholders Conference wasn’t just about shareholder value.
“It will be about the humanity of the company and what I posed last year,” he explained, “and that is the role and responsibility of a for-profit company and what we at Starbucks believe is our overriding responsibility, not just to make a profit, not just to build shareholder value, but to, in fact, have social impact and demonstrate the conscience of our company.”
What’s more, Schultz explained that 23 years ago the IPO Starbucks had 125 stores and a market cap of $250 million.
“Since then, for the most part, we have led a very charmed public life up until the cataclysmic financial crisis of 2008 when the market cap of Starbucks unfortunately dropped to $5.3 billion from the high at that point of $26 billion in 2006,” Schultz said. “However, if you look at the company today, a lot has changed. There are 22,000 stores in 66 countries. Last week we served over 75 million customers. We now employ over 300,000 people all over the world who are proudly wearing the green apron and as I stand here today I am proud to share with you that the market cap of Starbucks is at its all-time high at $70 billion. It’s a long way from 2008 and I just want to say with great humility, thank you all so much for your belief and your confidence in our ability to transform the company when we returned in 2008.”
For Schultz, it all goes back to “our people and it all goes back to the humanity and the relationship that we have built now with 300,000 people, but not through a slogan and not through marketing, but real actions every single day that demonstrates the reservoir of trust that we must have with everyone who wears the green apron.”