All About Coffee: Starbucks' Social Responsibilities

Helen Dou 2013.10.1.

Just like any other successful western companies, Starbucks has taken the responsibilities on the environmental and social issues. While Starbucks is famous for being able to instil the coffee idea into the Chinese consumers' minds, and they have also nurtured the western environmental and social responsibility concept into Chinese mindset. Starbucks is surely a responsible company, and the responsibilities are good to generate more revenue and wider customer base.

Starbucks College Student Forerunner of Environmental Protection

Starbucks corporates with China Soong Ching Ling Foundation to encourage Chinese college students to carry out innovative activities of environmental protection and contribute to the communities. This year is the third consecutive year of this project. The effort is to increase the environmental awareness among college students.

Starbucks Global Service Month - Green Community

As an important part of the Starbucks market, Starbucks China has launched a series of community service activities in over 58 Chinese cities. Throughout the month of April from 2011 to 2013, Starbucks has successfully gathered 47,000 participants and altogether contributed approximately 71,000 service hours. These activities have well built in a "give back to society" concept.

Starbucks China Education Project

The integrated project involves different aspects of efforts.

Improve the learning environment of rural schools and provide a better condition for the students;
Fund the rural teacher quality improvement to increase the education fairness for the children in poor countryside, which mostly in western China provinces, such as Yunan, Guangxi, Sichuan, Chongqing;
Water Education Project is a sub-project of the China Education Project. The aim is to increase people's knowledge of water safety and the importance of water quality.

Commitment to Origins - Global

Starbucks has promoted heavily on their efforts on sustaining the profit of coffee bean farmers to not let them suffer from volatile market fluctuations and support their families.

With all these projects and promotions of the social and environmental efforts that Starbucks has made, it is enough to impress the Chinese consumers and engage the promising generation, i.e. college students, to be hardcore Starbucks fan.

As we all know, in China, the price of Starbucks coffee is not regarded as cheap but expensive instead. It is more expensive than in its home-country, while Chinese annual income is way lower than Americans. While Starbucks is benefitting from the higher unit revenue, Starbucks is also striving to build a green and generous image among Chinese consumers to give them a strong reason why they should buy Starbucks products, besides the reason that Starbucks products are premium quality. This will encourage coffee drinkers to choose Starbucks by reminding them that their contribution is not purely for the company's ambition, but for the good of the whole society.

All those community service activities are involving college students, or similar age age group. Starbucks realized that the concept of “community service” is becoming bolder in young people’s mind, because of the trend of studying abroad and the heavier focus on civil education, so it provides the opportunity to engage the young people. Also, it is a “cool thing to do” in most of the young people’s minds. Those activities are very effective in terms of fostering loyal customers.

Starbucks brand is inheriting in Chinese consumers’ mindset and becoming bolder.