Why should a benign act of trying to encourage conversation on coffee about a very sensitive but recently battered issue face such backlash? With the benefit of hindsight, the answer is simple - Inability to on-board your internal and external stakeholders, both on emotional as well as practical aspect.
The Baristas who were to set forth the campaign by tagging and encouraging people to write "Race together" on their coffee cups, were never on-boarded. It came across as a irrelevant exercise for them which made their daily job more tiring with no visible change.This gap also led to a sense of insincerity to flow across, right up to the customers which led to what is explained in the next paragraph, revulsion. Great campaigns can fail if your field team is not convinced about the vision and objective of the campaign. To add, ease and practicality of implementation must be thoroughly planned and demonstrated before pushing the campaign down the chain up to the foot-soldiers, to avoid making it a boo boo.
Race is a sensitive topic and with the recent flare ups in US on the subject have led to an open yet sometimes an ugly debate with opinions and counter opinions being blasted. While the intention may be absolutely honest, this sudden campaign rubbed the general public the wrong way as it did come out as a marketing gimmick.As mentioned above, there was no serious attempt to actually diffuse tensions and encourage positive environment. The operational way of tagging #RaceTogether(rather than an emotional effort by the Baristas) made the customers feel that Starbucks is trying to piggy back a sensitive issue for its own marketing advantage.
The campaign is ordered to be halted prematurely.
Lesson learnt the hard way!
