Season of Giving... and Coffee

        Starbucks just recently aired their new holiday cups for the 2018 season. The past few years, Starbucks has received a lot of backlash due to their Christmas association and so on. This year, their four new holiday themed cups are green and red and display patterns of stars, flames, holly berries, and stripes. A lot of people are arguing that these Christmas cups do not display the Christmas spirit enough. In the past, the company also received the same backlash from their plain red holiday cups back in 2015. The company listened to their customers, thinking they were doing the right thing, and in 2017, their holiday cups displayed multiple red doodles on a plain white cup that were holiday themed (ornaments, presents, candy canes, etc.). They also featured a pair of hands being held. People began to interpret these hands as the same sex and believed that Starbucks was trying to push their gay agenda onto the public. The cups were supposed to be meant for customers to be able to design and color in the holiday cups themselves. Again, they received backlash from the public. This year, they retreated to their minimalistic designs, and beginning to hear the backlash once again.

        The holiday themed cups are quite the tradition for the coffee company, and in turn, it has also become a tradition for the public to take such interest in how the design is going to turn out and effect the public in any way, shape, or form. So, is Starbucks just trying to make holiday themed coffee cups for their customers to enjoy during the holiday season, or do they have us hooked and right where they want us?

        If you think about it, their holiday cups are quite the marketing tool. Even though a lot of the stories on them are somewhat negative, saying that Starbucks doesn’t support traditional Christmas, we all still talk about them. We are talking about their company, and I believe that is exactly what they want from us as their customers. There is the old saying that, ‘no publicity is bad publicity’, and I believe that that is the approach that Starbucks is trying to take. They have us all as consumers so wrapped up in this marketing technique, and we fall for it. We still go buy their coffee and use these cups despite what others are saying negatively about them. They are winning at marketing, if you ask me. They make and use these cups, listen to what the people say about them, change them up, hear more negative feedback, change them again, and still receive the negative feedback. They are using two very important marketing tactics: listening to your consumers and creating somewhat of a controversy to get people talking. Well done Starbucks.