The first Starbucks
was created in 1971 in Seattle’s historic Pike Place Market. To many people,
especially those who weren’t from Seattle had no idea what ‘Starbucks” was. In 1981 a man by the name of Howard Schultz ‘s entered into the
single-owned Starbucks. By August 1987, Howard Schultz’s purchased the
Starbucks store with the help of investors. That was roughly almost 30 years
ago. Since 2014 Starbucks has about 21,366 stores in the world. That’s a lot
compared to the single Starbucks purchased back in 1987. The estimated network
of Starbucks is set at $70.9 billion.
Starbucks has done a few
different campaigns in the past. Some of those campaigns included: Race
Together, Come Together, and there first ever brand entertainment campaign.
The Campaign I chose to
focus on is Race Together. Starbucks had the idea that if they could
incorporate race into conversations with customers then it would somehow make
things better. Sadly this is the opposite of what happened. The campaign was put together after killings
of unarmed black men from Ferguson to New York. There started to be riots all
over which sparked a lot of tension about race.
Schultz’s had the
idea to bring the conversation forward rather than remain “silent”. He said that by remaining silent we become apart of the problem. So, Starbucks employees were instructed to right hash tag #RaceTogether on cups and social media. In a statement released, Schultz said, “If we keep going our business and ringing the Starbucks register every day and ignoring this, then I think we are, in a sense, part of the problem”. Only after the company received a lot of backlash, they campaign was taken down and brushed under the rug.
idea to bring the conversation forward rather than remain “silent”. He said that by remaining silent we become apart of the problem. So, Starbucks employees were instructed to right hash tag #RaceTogether on cups and social media. In a statement released, Schultz said, “If we keep going our business and ringing the Starbucks register every day and ignoring this, then I think we are, in a sense, part of the problem”. Only after the company received a lot of backlash, they campaign was taken down and brushed under the rug.
The target audience was
everyone- to come together as one and stop the feud that has been ‘brewing’ for
quite some time now. A public advocate was cited on the, Fortune webpage where Apple was applauded after successfully
engaging in a campaign where the CEO, Time Cook, condemned religious freedom
laws. Companies such as Apple, Wal-Mart, the NBA, and Angie’s List noticed that
the religious freedom laws in which legislators were struggling with wasn’t
being solved. Tim Cook, Apple, stepped up and released a statement directing it
at how “ we were too slow on equality for African-Americans. We were too slow
on interracial marriage, and we are still too slow for the equality for the
LGBT.” With this statement alone, Cook received a lot of encouragement from the
public for speaking up- not how Starbucks did for Race Together, but about all minorities
in America. All the while, later on in
that same week Cook released that he was gay and proud of it.
According to an article written by Nicholas Pearce of the Fortune, he stated “all discrimination is indeed bad for business, Starbucks should
not have had to stand alone to face critics questioning whether the company had
a compelling business need for encouraging a national conversation via its
‘RaceTogether’ campaign, while Apple’s Cook is met with admiration and joined
by a veritable who’s who of corporate titans and Hollywood A-listers.”
Although Starbucks strategy attempted to bring awareness to the
racial tension in society, it did receive feedback. Whether that feedback was
good or bad, it still was a risk they were willing to take, or a risk they
thought would be successful. There is no doubt about it that the strategy is
driven by racial tension. The power of racial tension in today’s society is bad
and for Starbucks it was almost like a free ride to more money, thinking that
stirring racial controversy up would help. This may be the difference in
approach from Starbucks to apple.
-Sharnae
White
Cites:
No comments:
Post a Comment