It has been an exciting week for the Starbucks franchise. It launched one of its first ad campaigns complete with social media and user-generated content (UGC), and watched it promptly get hijacked and vandalized.
The competition officially launched on Tuesday and asked users to photograph the new billboards that were placed in six major U.S. cities. Users were then instructed to post the pictures on Twitter using the hashtags #top3percent or #starbucks. What made this poor timing was that the competition launched the same day as a Robert Greenwald’s YouTube documentary that attacks Starbucks for allegedly exploiting its workers.
When the film makers made this connection they rounded up their buddies and attacked the competition in what they are calling “Twitter bombing.” The campaign is called Stop Starbucks and is being led by the YouTube film maker. He is encouraging people to post pictures of them standing in-front of Starbucks with posters that explain how Starbucks allegedly mistreats its employees.
The Twitter feed #top3percent, although it has been inundated with negative messages, has seen very little in the way of creative attacks on the company, most just brag about how they are taking over the contest.
The main message of the vandals is that Starbucks is unfair because they do not allow its employees to unionize. The main message of the ad campaign and contest is that Starbucks makes great coffee and does not exploit overseas coffee bean growers. What consumers are left with is a store that makes great coffee without exploiting the most easily exploitable and also doesn’t let their American employees unionize.
Companies take risks every time they advertise. In the old days, 20 years ago, if a campaign was poorly done or missed its target the company may never even know about it. Thanks to social media, a company can launch a campaign on Tuesday and can know by Friday exactly how its brand is viewed and what is being said about it.
Although the attack has brought a lot of negative attention to Starbucks and its anti-union practices, every article written will have to discuss the campaign that started this. And that campaign talks about the company buying fair-trade beans, helping small and struggling farmers around the world and making great coffee. Whether you agree or disagree with the practices of Starbucks it is easy to see from a marketing point of view how the the reach of the company’s brand message might grow thanks to some vandals who wanted to have the opposite effect.
Finally, it must be said that the vandals’ campaign is not a grass roots movement against the coffee house as much as guerilla marketing to promote the film.
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