Page 131 - The Starbucks Experience

PRINCIPLE 4

only company certified to sell Fair Trade Certified coffee in
™
21 countries.
Because there is so much emotional energy swirling around
Starbucks—both favorable and unfavorable—journalist Jim
Romenesko decided to develop a blog site, www.starbucks
gossip.com, where customers, baristas, and others who are
interested in Starbucks can react to news articles about the
company. Jim reports Web traffic of approximately 5,000 vis-
itors per day, noting, “There are few companies about which
you could create a site like this. Starbucks has a truly loyal
following with strong emotional reactions to the company. I
can’t see putting up a subwaysandwichgossip.com site and
people caring that much about it.”
Despite the fact that people are very vocal about Star-
bucks, its leadership frequently takes an accepting and
116 respectful approach to the views of others. For example, Star-
bucks management has not sought to influence or encourage
a positive spin on the information shared on Jim’s site.
According to Jim, he has functioned completely independ-
ently of Starbucks. Jim notes,
“The Wall Street Journal did a story, and the reporter
asked Starbucks what the policy was concerning looking at
Web sites related to the company, and the response was some-
thing like, ‘We have no policy for monitoring Web sites.’ I see
that as consistent with some of its other hands-off policies.
For example, the fact that I sit for maybe five hours in a Star-
bucks with one drip coffee doesn’t bother the company at all.
It’s just a ‘leave them be’ attitude, and it extends to my Web
site and then to my coffee shop habits as well.”
In a business environment in which many corporate lead-
ers strictly monitor every outgoing brand message—and
sometimes threaten legal action when an outsider tinkers