The Starbucks disaster in South Korea cost a CEO his job, a brand its market, and thousands of customers their loyalty. The strangest part isn’t that somebody made the mistake; it’s that so many people didn’t catch it before it went public.
When I’m not scouring the internet for the weird and wonderful stories that I write in Ghost Mail every week, I make my living writing content for marketing agencies. This means that every once in a while, I write a line of copy that a client doesn’t like. It happens. I’ll get a note indicating where improvement is required, I’ll make the change and we’ll all get on with our lives. The whole process is usually seamless, professional, and unemotional.
Occasionally, the things I write in the marketing space will inspire people to take a particular action, or to buy a particular thing. Sometimes it makes them reflect, or even laugh. One thing my writing has never done, however, is enrage people to the point that they feel compelled to destroy the very products that I am trying to market.
I’m lucky in that way. As for the marketing team behind Starbucks in South Korea… well, they’ve been having a slightly harder time recently.
It started with a cup
On 18 May this year, Starbucks South Korea ran a promotion called “Tank Day”, built around their line of stainless steel mugs, dubbed “Tank Tumblers” for their size and capacity. It was part of a broader campaign highlighting the full tumbler range between 15 and 26 May.
What the marketing team appears to have missed is that 18 May is the anniversary of the 1980 Gwangju Massacre. On that date, the military junta killed hundreds of students at a pro-democracy protest using helicopters and – you guessed it – tanks.
That alone seems bad enough. But then the copywriting somehow made it worse.
Promotional material for the tumbler included the Korean phrase “whack on the table!” – unfortunately echoing a statement given by South Korean police in 1987 after a student activist died in custody. The claim was that he died of shock when an officer “whacked on the table” during interrogation. It later emerged that the student had been tortured to death. That scandal helped galvanise the mass protests that ended the military dictatorship and restored direct presidential elections later that year.
It’s a messy, traumatising story that sits at the centre of South Korea’s journey to democracy, much like the Soweto uprising of 1976 does in our own. It’s not the kind of thing people forget easily, which makes it almost unfathomable that nobody on the Starbucks marketing team paused at the sight of “Tank Day”, “18 May” and “whack on the table!” in a single campaign.
The marketing team may have been suffering from some kind of communal amnesia. The South Korean public they were advertising to was not.
Viral in the worst way
As you can imagine, none of this was received well. Protests sprang up outside Starbucks shops, where customers smashed branded cups and mugs with hammers while content creators streamed the spectacle. A boycott was called, and card payment volumes plunged 26% in a week. Fans deleted their loyalty apps and began demanding refunds from an estimated 400bn won ($260m) sitting on Starbucks prepaid cards. Government ministries cut ties, and even President Lee Jae Myung weighed in, calling out the brand’s “inhumane and disgraceful conduct”.
It’s a particularly hard blow for a brand that has spent almost three decades building itself into a premium, highly aspirational lifestyle fixture in South Korea. Reusable Starbucks cups (like the troublesome Tank) are a status symbol, and the cafés are popular places to work, study and socialise. Seoul has more than 300 locations – the highest concentration of Starbucks per capita in the world – and South Korea is the chain’s third largest market globally.
Initially, I thought the fact that Starbucks is an American brand might explain the faux pas. Maybe this was a campaign put together by an American marketing team, blissfully unaware of the connection between tanks and the 18th. But no – Starbucks doesn’t run its own stores in South Korea. It licenses the brand to Shinsegae, one of the country’s biggest retail conglomerates, which owns two thirds of the local operation through its E-Mart subsidiary. The people who created and signed off on this campaign were locals.
There are still a lot of unanswered questions about how exactly this happened. As someone who works in marketing, I can assure you that a campaign doesn’t go from one creator to storefronts nationwide with the click of a button; there are multiple checks and approvals along the way. I’m therefore as mystified by the multiple checkpoints this campaign got past as you are.
Two things we do know: Shinsegae Group says its marketers used generative AI to “help make suggestions” for the campaign, and some managers admitted to approving it without ever opening the email attachments showing the material.
The half-day apology
Starbucks South Korea may do their own marketing, but when it comes to crisis control, they apparently refer back to the American playbook.
First, they pulled the campaign and fired the CEO. Then, they suspended five other employees. The chairman of Shinsegae Group made a public apology on national TV, bowing three times to demonstrate his regret. So far, so logical – but then they did something unusual.
Starbucks announced it would close all 2,100 of its South Korean stores for half a day on 22 June so that staff could attend mandatory training. Employees reportedly received “education in historical awareness and social sensitivity through watching videos”. It was the first nationwide early closure since the chain opened in the country in 1999.
I can hear you asking, and I’m wondering too – why are baristas being trained to make up for the mistakes of the marketing team?
This is where the American strategy comes in. In 2018, Starbucks closed more than half its US stores for racial-bias training after staff called the police on two black customers waiting for a table. There, the training made sense: front-of-house made the mistake, so front-of-house got the training. In South Korea, the fix feels performative and out of touch. It’s the corporate equivalent of writing lines on a blackboard: highly visible, dutifully painful, and entirely disconnected from the failure it’s meant to address.
Everybody looked, nobody saw
Starbucks is unfortunately in good company here. The marketing faux pas is practically its own genre. Somewhere between the idea and the storefront, a room full of people looked at something and didn’t really see it.
Sometimes the failure is one of imagination. Bloomingdale’s ran a 2015 holiday catalogue ad showing a man leering at a laughing woman beside the words “Spike your best friend’s eggnog when they’re not looking”. That’s line presumably read as festive mischief in the room, and as a date-rape joke everywhere else.
Heineken’s 2018 “Sometimes, Lighter Is Better” spot slid a beer past three black people and into the hand of a white woman, which is the kind of glaring issue that only survives a storyboard review if nobody in the room is willing to say the obvious sentence out loud. Nivea managed something similar in 2017 with a deodorant ad captioned “White Is Purity”, which white supremacists adopted with such enthusiasm that the brand pulled it within hours.
Sometimes it’s a failure of memory. Adidas emailed Boston Marathon finishers in 2017 with the subject line “Congrats, you survived the Boston Marathon!” just four years after a bombing at that same finish line killed three people. Urban Outfitters sold a vintage Kent State sweatshirt in 2014, complete with red splatter marks and holes, 44 years after the National Guard shot dead four student protesters on that campus. Like the Starbucks South Korea debacle, these are cases where the reference wasn’t obscure. For some reason, nobody involved connected the words in front of them to the elephant in the room.
And sometimes the brand just doesn’t seem to understand (or respect) the market it’s selling to. Dolce & Gabbana’s 2018 “DG Loves China” campaign featured a Chinese model struggling to eat Italian food with chopsticks, complete with patronising voiceover. When the response was predictably furious, the brand’s Shanghai show was cancelled and their standing in China has never fully recovered. That same year H&M photographed a black child in a hoodie reading “Coolest Monkey in the Jungle”, which you might recall led to a slew of South African stores getting vandalised.
Attention is a scarce resource
None of these campaigns escaped into the world by accident. Bloomingdale’s, Nivea and H&M all have brand teams, legal teams and sign-off processes designed precisely to catch this sort of thing.
The problem is that approval and attention aren’t the same thing. A signature on a form means someone had the opportunity to look. It doesn’t mean that they actually did.
This is why the one near-miss in the pile is worth mentioning. In 2019, Nike designed a Fourth of July Air Max 1 with the 13-star Betsy Ross flag stitched onto the heel. The shoes had already gone out to retailers when Colin Kaepernick, then the face of the brand’s biggest campaign, phoned Nike to say that he and others found the flag offensive for its associations with the slavery era. Nike asked the stores to send the shoes back. The company took a beating for it – a state governor pulled tax incentives, senators announced boycotts, and the Anti-Defamation League went on record to say the flag isn’t a white supremacist symbol at all. You can argue about whether Nike made the right call. What you can’t argue with is the mechanism: somebody looked at the product, recognised something the room had missed, and picked up the phone.
The gap in attention that underpins all these stories is about to get much wider in every marketing department in the world, because we’re all being handed tools that make it easier than ever to make stuff. The machines will keep getting better at producing the work. So far, nobody is building a tool that gets better at reading it in context. If Starbucks is anything to go by, relying on AI suggestions isn’t the smartest approach to marketing.
About the author: Dominique Olivier
Dominique Olivier uses her love of storytelling and ideation to help brands solve problems.
Her first book, Lessons from Loss, has been published by Penguin Random House.
She is a weekly columnist in Ghost Mail and collaborates with The Finance Ghost on Ghost Mail Weekender, a Sunday publication designed to help you be more interesting.
You can learn more about her work at dominiqueolivier.com and she can be reached on LinkedIn here.
