Sensitivity in Culture

In early November 2015, Starbucks – the largest coffeehouse company in the world and also a secular coffeehouse – was stirred up in a controversy for its plain red holiday cups. A simple change in Starbucks’ holiday-themed cups to a minimalist plain red cups design has caused the company’s brand to be under fire for being unsupportive of Christmas and has upset millions of Christians resulting in a negative viral buzz for the company. Joshua Feuerstein, a former pastor who calls himself a “social media personality’’, shared a video on Facebook lashing and criticizes Starbucks for being against Jesus by removing Christmas from their cups; the video that was posted on 5th November now have over 13 million views.

Starbucks have been careless with its design decision and ignored the importance and sensitivity in a subculture. Subculture refers to a group of people with shared value systems based on common life experiences and situations (Kolter, 2013). Each culture contains smaller subcultures such as nationalities, religion, geographic regions etc. Starbucks’ decision by coming up with the minimalist design was initially to avoid offending anyone by staying secular has resulted in offending the Christian religion especially after last year’s design with reindeer and Christmas ornament on it (Wattles, 2015).

In an attempt to account for the strong cultural differences in probabilistic thinking, Phillips and Wright (1977), Wright et al. (1978) have suggested a causal relationship with the “fate-orientation’’ of a culture (Wright and Phillips, 1980).

Communicating information about a particular religion aesthetically allows others to gain a deeper understanding of that religion through concrete details and, in particular, through the personal experiences of others. Poetic information communicates certain ideas more persuasively and more interactively than analytical writing (Abela, 2014).