Wake up and smell the coffee (Final Episode)

As you might remember, the idea of telling you about the Starbucks case was born while I was studying for my Marketing Final. The way this company heard what their customers had to say first when they were worried about the lack of green growing practices, and then about how significative the results from the Chiapas Project were, seemed to me one of the clearest examples of the two-way communication between companies and society that is becoming more and more frequent.

Through the four episodes you saw that the process of getting involved, although rewarding, was long, complex and quite expensive. Now, did Starbucks do it only out of good will? Of course not! Ok, they were commited to sustainability and made it very clear in the principles for their mission statement… but there’s more to it. And I have two quotations to prove it:

“If only one company in the industry is doing the right thing, it’s not going to solve the problem, so for the good of the industry and the good of the world you need to have the whole industry doing it.” Glenn Prickett, Vice president of CI

“75% to 80% of customers reward corporations that are perceived to be good corporate citizens; 20% punish those that are not.” Senior vice president of CSR at Starbucks (I don’t have their name, sorry!)

Maybe I haven’t recovered from the Finals but to me this sounds a lot like Marketing 101: anyone else perceives positioning strategies over here? It’s not cold hearted at all, though, we have a perfect win-win situation: CI found a wonderful partner for their program to work, farmers improved their way of living by at the same time conserving the environment, and Starbucks created yet another differentiation driver in the specialty market industry, rising the bar for its competitors.

The whole point of this last post was to show that any form of corporate responsibility is not equivalent to charity at all. Companies don’t spend money by enhancing the way they operate, they invest it… and if they work hard enough and make CSR part of their core business, repayment eventually happens.