I’ve been getting some decent traffic from Facebook, but nothing compares to an article I wrote about Syrian Refugees coming to New Hampshire. If you want someone’s attention, write about illegal immigration or refugee resettlement. The jobs and economy narratives are good too, but I think we all know why Mr. Trump won the White House.
Starbucks didn’t get the memo.
(Yahoo! Finance) Starbucks’ brand has taken a beating since the company announced plans to hire 10,000 refugees worldwide in the next five years in response to Donald Trump’s executive order intended to prevent refugees from entering the US.
The coffee giant’s consumer perception levels have fallen by two-thirds since late January, according to YouGov BrandIndex.
The perception tracker measures if respondents have “heard anything about the brand in the last two weeks, through advertising, news or word
of mouth, was it positive or negative.” In Starbucks’ case, perception is still overall positive, but significantly lower than it was prior to CEO Howard Schultz published a public letter outlining the company’s plans to give refugees jobs.
The stock is not suffering, and sales don’t seem affected in any meaningful way, but perception is a starting point for such declines. A bad PR move is a gut punch.
Race Together didn’t last a week.
Before that, the CEO told someone who opposed Gay Marriage not to invest in the Coffee Giant.
I don’t have a problem with any of that. Starbucks is a large and innovative organization willing to try things that could result in the occasional hit. There’s nothing wrong with being honest about you priorities in the free market and living and dying by those decisions.
Personally, I think the whole Starbucks experience has always been a bit pretentious. The political antics are clearly an extension of that, but that hardly matters. I don’t care much for their coffee and never have.
They can’t lose my business because they never really had it. But there are plenty of other American’s who are sensitive to the refugee issue as it relates to that other standard, jobs and the economy.
Starbucks stood up and declared that American’s who are out of work would have to take a back seat to refugees those same American’s may not have even wanted to see settled here in the first place.
If Starbucks is that tone deaf or just that pretentious, they will find themselves making mistakes that will eventually hurt their bottom line.
H/T HotAir
