0 Leadership Secrets You Should Already Know

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Not all of us naturally know how to lead. Some leaders have received training, had a mentor or are just plain naturally intuitive leaders. However, many wing it and hope for the best. If you want to be a great leader, here’s what you should know.

Accept a lateral transfer.

My clients sometimes complain of boredom. Here is a direct quote: “I can do this in my sleep, and if I was near retirement, that would be a good thing, but I’m not." The conversation naturally then moves into a desire for a promotion.
When a lateral transfer is proposed, many leaders seem to balk at this notion. It is as though they’re insulted. Here’s the thing: A lateral transfer promotes your versatility. By accepting a lateral transfer, you showcase that your skills are transferable, you can learn new things and you can build relationships with a whole new set of stakeholders.


Do not exercise command and control.

The good news is that you have been assigned a cool initiative. Leaders, rather than viewing this as a collective exercise, sometimes decide they are in charge and go for the glory.
Remember, diversity of thought brings richer solutions. You will never be rewarded for being the sole architect, even if the project successfully gets off the ground. Your brand should be about bringing different views to the table and never about what you solely think is the best.

Demonstrate emotional resilience.

Things go wrong. Of course, this creates frustration and anxiety. Your job is not to be reactive. Rather, be that leader who guides your team through the storm. You may not have the answers right away. With careful consideration and dialogue, you are sure to find the solution. Be known as the leader who can navigate through tough times.

Read the room.

Passion leads to high energy and enthusiasm. On a good day, this is inspiring and infectious. On a not so good day, you may miss key signs your audience is not on board.
Watch your audience’s body language. Poor eye contact, reverting to mobile devices and laptops, fidgeting, confused and unhappy facial expressions are cues that mean something is not aligned. Now, stop and take a pulse. Then, recalibrate and allow for a healthy discussion amongst your team members.

Stop being so granular.

Trust your own capabilities. It is assumed that you know your stuff. Your audience wants a high-level overview and an understanding that you are aligned strategically. The more senior you are, the more you must let go of defending your position with tactics. Show that you grasp how your mandate fits into the overall vision.

Ramp up your EQ.

How often do we hear, “They have great technical skills, but on the leadership front, not so much”? Before you charge ahead with your how to and technical recommendations, think about the need to build rapport.
Yes, you might be a subject matter expert. Everyone, though, has a need to win and a particular lens regarding how to achieve that win. You must work to understand their vantage points. If you don’t, you will be seen as running your own race. No matter how hard you run, if you don’t seek to build relationships based on colleagues’ vantage points, it is unlikely you will get traction. Your brilliant ideas may never see the light of day.

Adopt a mentoring role.

This doesn’t necessarily mean you officially take on mentees. What it does mean is that you are invested in helping others succeed. You should be known as a leader who takes the time to guide and offer advice to those who aspire for more. In essence, as a leader, you want to be viewed as a confidante where others see you as a safe haven and sage advisor.
Being a great leader requires many roles and many challenges. With each experience, you pivot closer to being the ideal leader. Remember, people do not leave jobs -- they leave bosses. Be that leader everyone wants to work with.

sources. forbes

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0 Starbucks : Social media, Profit, and Coffe.

Starbucks Corporation is the leading roaster, retailer, and marketer of specialty coffee in the world. Its operations include upwards of 7,300 coffee shops and kiosks in the United States, and nearly 3,000 in 34 other countries, with the largest numbers located in Japan, Canada, the United Kingdom, China, Taiwan, South Korea, the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, Mexico, Australia, Germany, and New Zealand.

In addition to a variety of coffees and coffee drinks, Starbucks shops also feature Tazo teas; pastriesand other food items; espresso machines, coffee brewers, and other coffee- and tea-related items; and music CDs. The company also sells many of these products via mail-order and online at starbucks.com. It also wholesales its coffee to restaurants, businesses, education and healthcare institutions, hotels, and airlines.

What Starbucks knows about social media 

Getting customers is good. Keeping customers is great. With over 21,000 stores in more than 65 countries, its a safe bet that anyone with even a passing interest in coffee already knows Starbucks exists.

The company has reached critical mass in terms of advertising so its challenge at this point is keeping customers loyal so they're not swayed by competitors with similar offerings.
The Starbucks social media team is great at offering the customer service of local coffee shop on a grand scale over its social media channels.

Even though they're a huge company, they still give customers individual attention, which no doubt goes a long way toward keeping them coming back for more.

Coffee is made for socializing. One of the reasons behind Starbucks' social media success is that drinking coffee is a social activity.People love to meet over coffee, bring each other coffee, swap stories about coffee, and build coffee acquisition into their morning routines.

By extension, sharing the coffee-drinking experience is a natural fit for platforms like Twitter and Facebook. In a classic case of "build it and they will come," all Starbucks has to do is create places for coffee drinkers to congregate online and they will happily oblige.

Consistent branding is key. No matter what Starbucks social platform you visit, the Starbucks touch is evident.The company's social channels all have the same look, feel, and tone as their stores. Although the marketing team takes a slightly approach from Twitter to Instagram to Facebook, the content is consistently unified around the company's mission, message, and goals.

Whether you're a fan of the Starbucks product line or not, their social media success is undeniable. As with every other aspect of the company, their attention to detail and customer-centric messaging is what makes their social outreach some of the best in the business.

Starbucks 

Starbucks offers specialty coffee and snacks to its customers, and holds the title of most recognized and respected coffee brand. The first Starbucks located Seattle in 1971. This chart showed the revenue of the primary coffeehouse chains all over the world in 2015. It shows that Starbucks leads dramatically.

Revenue of selected leading coffee shop chain worldwide in 2016 (in billion U.S. Dollars)

Statista

As the most famous coffee store in the world, Starbucks has used multiple marketing strategies to make its customers recognize its products and to increase its sales. Starbucks has used traditional media such as TV, magazines, radio and newspaper. Starbucks has also used “new media”, in other words, social media to improve its brand equity. It uses social media as a valuable marketing tool to get more market share, increase profits, and provide better customer service.

How Starbucks Crushes It on Social Media

• 37.32 million Facebook likes 
• 6.56 million Twitter followers 
• 2.98 million Instagram fans 
• 2.86 million Google+ followers 
• 160K Pinterest followers 
• 32K YouTube subscribers 

Those numbers are staggering but well-earned. There's no doubt Starbucks is crushing social media, but how do they do it? Let's take a look.

Facebook 

Interestingly, the Starbucks social media management team doesn't post Facebook updates all that often. When they do, however, they're usually eye-catching and ultra-clever. The posts strike a good balance between fun contests, helpful tips for the java-loving crowd, and subtle sales messages to its customers.

Twitter 

Starbucks has a fascinating and unique approach to Twitter updates -- they don't do them all the time rather strategically! Fans who connect to the company on Twitter to catch the latest news and updates are in for a surprise. The team does post unique content but also uses the Twitter as a service to reach out to customers talking about their in-store or product experiences.

All Tweets are directed at specific Twitter users who've "spoken" to Starbucks in their own timeline, sometimes with a complaint or negative feedback. The Starbucks team checks in several times a day and encourages dissatisfied customers to get in touch with the company for follow-up using a Twitter-specific email address. It's an unorthodox but smart approach to deal with customer complaints before they have a chance to get out of hand.

Pinterest and Instagram 

A big part of the coffee culture is about beautifully decorated espressos and fancy cups to drink your favorite cuppa. Starbucks really shines on visually-oriented social sites like Pinterest and Instagram where they can post appealing beverage-related eye candy. The company maintains several Pinboards featuring tea rituals, coffee gadgets, and soothing spaces to get cozy in while you sip. Instagram, on the other hand, is an assortment of cool images related to the coffee community and culture.

How Starbucks Uses Pricing Strategy for Profit Maximation

Starbucks raised their beverage prices by an average of 1% across the U.S, a move that represented the company’s first significant price increase in 18 months. I failed to notice because the price change didn’t affect grande or venti (medium and large) brewed coffees and I don’t mess with smaller sizes, but anyone who purchases tall size (small) brews saw as much as a 10 cent increase.The company’s third quarter net income rose 25% to $417.8 million from $333.1 million a year earlier, and green coffee prices have plummeted, so what gives?

Starbucks claims the price increase is due to rising labor and non-coffee commodity costs, but with the significantly lower coffee costs already improving their profit margins, it seems unlikely this justification is the true reason for the hike in prices. In addition, the price hike was applied to less than a third of their beverages and only targets certain regions. Implementing such a specific and minor price increase when the bottom line is already in great shape might seem like a greedy tactic, but the Starbucks approach to pricing is one we can all use to improve our margins. As we’ve said before, it only takes a 1% increase in prices to raise profits by an average of 11%.

Value Based Pricing Can Boost Margins

For the most part, Starbucks is a master of employing value based pricing to maximize profits, and they use research and customer analysis to formulate targeted price increases that capture the greatest amount consumers are willing to pay without driving them off. Profit maximization is the process by which a company determines the price and product output level that generates the most profit. While that may seem obvious to anyone involved in running a business, it’s rare to see companies using a value based pricing approach to effectively uncover the maximum amount a customer base is willing to spend on their products. As such, let’s take a look at how Starbucks introduces price hikes and see how you can use their approach to generate higher profits.

Product Versioning & Price Communication

They also apply price increases to specific drinks and sizes rather than the whole lot. By raising the price of the tall size brewed coffee exclusively, Starbucks is able to capture consumer surplus from the customers who find more value in upgrading to grande after witnessing the price of a small drip with tax climb over the $2 mark. By versioning the product in this way, the company can enjoy a slightly higher margin from these customers who were persuaded by the price hike to purchase larger sizes.

Starbucks also expertly communicates their price increases to manipulate consumer perception. The price hike might be based on an analysis of the customer’s willingness to pay, but they associate the increase with what appears to be a fair reason. Using increased commodity costs to justify the price as well as statements that aim to make the hike look insignificant (less than a third of beverages will be affected, for example) help foster an attitude of acceptance.

What can Your Business Learn From Starbucks? 

The profit maximizing tactics Starbucks implements in their pricing strategy are vital components of a process anyone can use. Here are some of the takeaways you can apply to your own business:

1. Study your customer personas. Starbucks understands that the majority of their customer base is fairly insensitive to price, and uses small price increases that everyday consumers barely notice to boost margins. Quantify your buyer personas and the demand for your product or service will help you choose a price that captures the maximum amount your customers are willing to pay.

2. Justify the exchange rate for your product. Communicating price increases effectively is crucial to a successful price hike, and managing customer perception is a key part of the Starbucks strategy. Support your price increases using changes in the market such as higher commodity costs and ease the pain on the consumer by finding an attractive way to publicize the new prices. Starbucks said their beverage prices were increasing by an average of 1%, but that low average probably stemmed from including all of their beverages in the equation, including ones that remained at the same prices.

3. Use product differentiation to put your company in the lead. You can justify maximizing your profits using the fairest of reasons, but if the customers don’t value your service the way they value a delicious cup of coffee, then a decrease in demand is inevitable. Build a service or product that consumers can’t live without, and you’ll be able to implement price hikes without turning off your customers.

4. Don’t increase the prices of the products with the highest margins. Raise the prices of the products surrounding them. As mentioned earlier, Starbucks raised the price of the tall size brew exclusively in order to persuade customers to purchase larger sizes (with slightly higher margins). Price hikes for your lower margin products can entice customers to upgrade to more expensive options, especially with respect to products and services that are tiered based on time usage and features. The goal is to use the price increases to guide the customer towards your most profitable product.

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