Starbucks for Good
by Michael HoffmanTuesday, February 27th, 2007
Starbucks has a certain image that it projects. It’s cool, progressive and in-touch with a cultural hipness that you don’t see from many other companies. But they are also a big public company with the primary mission of increasing shareholder value, i.e. making money.
So it should not come as a surprise that Starbucks became a target for an advocacy campaign from Oxfam over their treatment of Ethiopian coffee growers. As The Economist put it, “A growing number of coffee drinkers seem to prefer their morning grande skinny latte without a foul-tasting double-shot of social injustice.”
The dispute centers around Ethiopian coffee farmers desire to trademark the names of their specialty coffee. This would ensure that if Starbucks and other companies wanted to use those names in their marketing, the farmers would get a higher price per pound. There is precedent for this approach and it seems to be working in Latin America. (I am no expert.)
We are pleased to have Oxfam on the panel we are hosting at the Nonprofit Technology Conference this year to talk about their action against Starbucks and how they used video as the centerpiece of the campaign. Starbucks has begun to buckle, and just last week announced they were working on an accommodation with the Ethiopian government.
But what one hand does badly another does well. Starbucks, in partnership with our friends at UNICEF, are marketing a book called, A Long Way Home: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah. I did something I have never done before, bought a non-coffee product at Starbucks.
I usually think of those who buy music or games at Starbucks as some kind of sucker, paying higher prices than they need to and being influenced by Starbucks’ manufactured cultural cool. But tomorrow I am on a 15-hour trip to Jerusalem, and I need something to read (if my kids sleep) and the story of children soldiers in Africa is an important one, and we are talking to the folks at UNICEF about making their excellent marketing even more excellent… so I bought the book. While I think Starbucks has more to gain financially than UNICEF in this deal, I think, as I said recently, that we can’t only think about marketing in terms of straight dollars. We have to be aware of the incremental steps we take toward positive cultural change, which, as we see with the TXU deal, can pay off big down the road.
