Starbucks: The Coffee Icon
Starbucks was founded in Seattle, Washington. Since 1971, the coffee company has expanded and promoted its brand with many successful campaigns and artifacts. In fact, Starbucks has become one of the most successful coffee companies in America and is rapidly expanding its customer base. How has it created and promoted its brand to so many people so well? It could be argued that all of the artifacts that Starbucks has created are responsible for its brand’s message and notoriety. Without Starbucks’ cup designs, commercials, and website, the company’s brand would not be known for its flexibility, authority, cleanliness, and welcoming atmosphere.
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Starbucks is well known for redesigning its cups every few months, and these designs have been known to cause some commotion even though the designs change very little. The cups always have warm and welcoming colors that are arranged in a clean design. As a result, this particular style has become part of the Starbucks brand. The company is an expert at making notoriously designed cups. The mode and media of the cups are the main reasons that they are so well known.
The mode of the cups is visual, and serves to remind the people that see it of the Starbucks brand, which the company has carefully cultivated over the years. This mode is more successful than a text-based mode because all it takes is one glance for a person to get the message that the cup is sending—that they should go to Starbucks. Furthermore, the fact that the cup design is always changing with the seasons says that Starbucks adapts for its audience. Furthermore, the media complements the mode well by being face-to-face.
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The fact that potential customers can see the notorious cups in the real world reminds them that there is a Starbucks nearby. Whereas, looking at a picture of a Starbucks cup online or on a poster would be less successful at bringing in customers because those medias do not imply that a Starbucks is a convenient distance away. Furthermore, the audience of these cups is anyone who can see and recognize the cups because of their mode and media. In fact, the overall audience is larger due to the fact that these cups do not require a potential customer to be able to use digital media. The purpose of this artifact is to inform anyone in the vicinity that a Starbucks is nearby, and to persuade that same audience to go to a Starbucks location. The rhetorical appeal of Starbucks cups is ethos because Starbucks is an authority on coffee, tea, and cocoa products. This appeal is evident in the use of the Starbucks name and colors, which are heavily associated with high quality and satisfactory products.
The design of the cups that Starbucks drinks come in is very important in maintaining Starbucks’ image. The cups may always look different, but they always have a sleek and clean design accompanied by warm colors that sends the message that Starbucks is clean and warm. Furthermore, the fact that the designs change so readily indicates that Starbucks is willing to change to meet the needs of its audience, which adds flexibility to Starbucks’ brand.
Starbucks releases new commercials to promote its business at various times throughout the year. At the beginning of 2017, Starbucks released a commercial that stated all of its accomplishments from the previous year. The mode of this artifact is visual, audio, and text-based. The visual part of the commercial helps to illustrate and connect the broader points that the text-based parts state. On the other hand, the audio part of the commercial helps to keep people interested in the commercial, so that they will read the text. The text part of the commercial provides useful information and statistics. All of these modes work together to entertain and inform.
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Moreover, the media of the commercial is digital, which makes it easy for most people to find and share online. However, the commercial is also available on television for the people that are not adept at using computers. In this instance, digital media is the best form for this advertisement because it allows for all three modes to be utilized for maximum effect. A poster, or billboard would not be able to utilize entertaining music, or provide as much in depth information as a video with audio and text.
The audience of the aforementioned commercial is anyone who owns a television or computer with internet access. This includes many people from infants to the elderly. Also, it is important to note that the commercial states that Starbucks helps employ veterans and teens. So, those subset groups might be especially interested in this artifact. The overall purposes of this commercial are to inform about all of the important things Starbucks did in 2016, and to persuade people to like Starbucks more by displaying its charitable side. Interestingly, the rhetorical appeals that the commercial uses are pathos, and ethos.
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Pathos is illustrated by all of the statements in the commercial about helping the environment and subset groups that generally have a hard time finding employment. Pathos is also evoked by the images of all of the smiling employees, who are presumably happy because they work at Starbucks. The rhetorical appeal, ethos, is evident in the statistics shown throughout the video. Based on these statistics, it can be assumed that Starbucks is an authority on coffee because it sold an enormous amount of coffee in 2016. All of these factors are what makes this artifact a great addition to the Starbucks brand, which prides itself on its charitability and caffeine expertise. Interestingly, the commercial from early January, 2017 furthers the idea that Starbucks exists to meet the needs of its audience by stating what it has done for the people that it employs. This commercial also establishes that the Starbucks brand revolves around its authority on coffee by showing statistics that prove this idea.
The design of a website makes subtle statements about the company that created it. Therefore, Starbucks website consists of easy to navigate topics, many vibrant images, warm colors, and a lot of open space. The mode of the website is text-based and visual. The text is in small chunks and a highly readable font so that people can easily navigate to different areas on the site. Furthermore, the visuals help to break apart text, so that it is not overwhelming to the viewer. The media is digital; therefore, it is very compatible with the mode. A vast amount of information is contained on the website, so it would be difficult to make a print version or audio version of it. A print version would have way too much text. Consequently, a reader would lose interest quickly if they could not find the information they were looking for immediately. However, a potential customer can easily find what they are looking for on the website. An audio version of the website would have very similar problem to the print version—it would be much too long to retain a potential customer’s interest. It would also falter in that it would not have the images that the website has, which help viewers to better understand the products that Starbucks sells.
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The audience of the website is anyone with internet access, which is a very broad audience because technology is utilized by many types of people. However, some people that are uncomfortable with technology may not be able to use the site. Therefore, the biggest component of the audience is likely young people from the age of early teens to late thirties; these subsets of the population generally have the most knowhow about modern technology because they were raised with it. The purpose of the website is to inform old and new customers alike about Starbucks and its products, and to persuade them to buy those products.
For example, the use of visuals featuring delicious looking products is particularly persuasive, and is accompanied by small chunks of text that inform about the products that are depicted. The rhetorical appeal that the website uses is mostly ethos. Starbucks shows its authority on quality coffee, tea, and cocoa by stating that it uses the finest products and has been serving quality goods for decades. Ethos is also represented by the warm forest green theme that is highly associated with Starbucks’ brand. What further solidifies this notion of Starbucks being an authority is the use of ethos on Starbucks’ very professional looking website; facts about the company are openly shown on the uncluttered pages. Like the cup designs, the website is also clean, sleek, and accented by welcoming colors. This further proves that Starbucks is using recurring visual modes to add the idea that its stores are cleanly and welcoming to its brand.
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The conclusion can be drawn that Starbucks’ brand and image are created and retained by so much more than just coffee. Every artifact that Starbucks produces adds to its overall brand. One cup, one commercial, or even one website change produced by the company can change the way Starbucks’ audience views the company. Sometimes these changes are small, and sometimes these changes have unintended consequences, but they all add up to create the overarching brand that Starbucks has been building since it was created—a brand that expresses authority, cleanliness, a welcoming atmosphere, and flexibility.
Reflection: Project 1
I struggled a lot with this project in the beginning. In fact, I really didn't know what I was doing until I went to my first conference. I had to rewrite my entire essay from scratch, but I feel that rewriting it was worth it because the final draft turned out so much better than the first two drafts. I could really tell when this project started to make sense, it was when my teacher wrote out a detailed explanation of what I needed to address about all three of the artifacts. Furthermore, when I started writing the third draft, it was so much easier than writing the first two even though I had to restart the paper from nothing. This project has really showed me than writing is not a stiff and by the book process. It has also helped me understand that essays are not the only valid form of college writing, which confused me at first. However, the more of this essay that I wrote, the more comfortable I felt about my writing in general. All in all, this project definitely expanded my knowledge of genre, mode, media, audience, and rhetorical appeal. More importantly, it has helped me become more comfortable with changing my writing style to fit the genre.