Every Sip Changes the World
Be a
responsible coffee consumer
The unknown issues
behind every cup
Hong
Kong ranked 72 in coffee consumption per capita was 1.1kg (0.4 cups) which is one third of the annual consumption
in Japan (Wikipedia, 2014; Wall Street Daily, LLC, 2014). Our
group expected the coffee consumption in Hong Kong will continue to increase. However, do you know the
problem behind every cup of coffee?
The environmental issues
like water pollution and contamination from the processing of coffee
beans, the unfair trade between coffee farmers or abuse
of the child labor; The recent exposure of cruel treatment toward civets…… probably
the problems underlying every sip are more scary than you can image.
We
wish to persuade Hong Kong people to consume an ethical and environmental
friendly Starbuck coffee. In long-term, this behavior can support the
community, fair trade and minimize the environmental footprint.
Coffee and
Farmer Equity (C.A.F.E.) Practice
Coffee and
Farmer Equity (C.A.F.E.) Practices ensure the quality and integrity of the
coffee for Starbucks stores. A third-party organization will evaluate and
verify the suppliers participating in C.A.F.E. Practices. The C.A.F.E. Practices was developed in
collaboration of Starbucks and conservation international (CI) ten years ago.
It created social and economic impacts for more than one million worker and environmental improvements on the thousands of
participating farms (Starbucks
Corporation 2014).
Starbucks ensure
the product quality by accessing the coffee quality reaches the high quality
standards. Suppliers must submit evidence of the price for the green coffees to
achieve the economic accountability requirements. Social responsibility and
environmental leadership are verified by third party. Workers are working in
safe and fair condition, compliance with minimum-wage requirement and
prohibition of child under 14. Coffee producers must manage
waste, protect water quality, conserve water and energy, preserve biodiversity
and reduce agrochemical use. (Starbucks Corporation 2014).
for more information click http://www.starbucks.com/responsibility/sourcing/coffee
Go Starbucks! Make your every sip change the world
Our tactics
Ethos, pathos, and logos are the essential elements for
our persuasion tactics to “Go Starbucks!”, let us take a look of what these three tactics are. First, we know that for “ethos”, it is about the
characteristics, and credibility of messengers, items like
authority/credibility, liking/association, reciprocation, listening,
personalizing, humor whereas for “pathos”, it refers to
the audience perception and response; and the last one, “logos”, it is about the content and form of message, like how we
know the audience, context, conformity, commitment, and etc.
Logos
Simplicity!
Starbucks, a very distinctive name, once you
hear or see the logo of Starbucks, every one of us know that it is “coffee”, a
very clear message delivered to the audience. By using the eco-label, Starbucks has been bringing out a very clear and simple message too – Being a Responsible Company! The
simplicity of message has been
delivered a very clear message to the audience - Environmentally protection pioneer as a coffee seller.
Pathos
As we are
aiming to persuade the Hong Kong people to buy Starbucks coffee
We studied the a 6-D Hofstede model to
analysis the culture of Hong Kong as following diagram shows:
one
of the dimensions - “indulgence” explains how “the extent to which people try
to control their desires and impulses” (greet-hofstede.com),
Hong Kong scores relatively low which indicates that the Hong Kong people are “restrained
by social norms and feel that indulging themselves is somewhat wrong” (geert-hofstede.com).
Thinking
about when
we are sipping coffee in Starbucks,
we are putting an effort in protecting the global
environment and so as to sustain the long term development of the coffee
farmers. You are not only tasting a cup
of coffee but also putting an effort to protect our globe. And remember the misery story of civet? The
traditional method of collecting feces from wild civets has given way to
intensive farming methods in which civets in battery cage systems are
force fed the coffee beans (wikipedia).
Also as Cialdini stated that people would like to have “Social proof”, they would “follow
the lead of similar others” as “human
beings rely heavily on the people around them for cues on how to think, feel
and act”. (Cialdini, p. 75),
considering there are already some loyal Starbucks customers, as we promoting those
ideas, they will become our opinion leaders and weave a fashion to involve more
people choose Starbucks, only !
Ethos
In 2012, 93% of Starbuck’s coffee sourced
through C.A.F.E. practices and Fairtrade, it has targeted to achieve 100% in
2015 for sourcing ethical coffee. A very clear message of Starbucks - a social responsible company. Every year, Starbucks launches its CSR report and
provide detail information about how it progress and where to achieve in the
future. Their on-going track of the practice reinforces its credibility.
How
does
our video work
Our group supports the ideas in one of our readings, Necessary of Persuasion and applied some concepts to clip our video. For example, because of credibility is the precondition of a convincing persuasion,
thus we provide some numbers and statics from the 3rd authority
party to increase our credibility. We also recognize numbers do not make an
emotional impact but stories can, you can see tsome sensational pictures to tell story, we also implant some
new knowledge in our video because few people know the environment damage
issues through planting coffee. We hope audience will think feel learning more
than convincing and selling after watching our video.
Another reading we found very practical is Change Through Persuasion, especially authors’ perspective on
convince the audience that radical change
is imperative, demonstrate why the new direction is the right one, that is
why half of our video is contributing to
arose people’s awareness of the urgency of change.
Again,
because our target is Hong Kong audience, we set some principles to achieve the persuasion. Firstly, Hong Kong is a relative high degree masculine society, time efficiency is
placed in very high place in social practice and we think a persuasive video
should be limited within 2 minutes. Secondly, about the content, in order to be
eye-catching, succinct style with few words will be favored. We just select typical
story out of abundance of
information provided by the label to better
fit our context. Thus, environment protection, fair-trade issue and child labor
are chosen to be the main body Thirdly, Hong Kong's culture is definitely
pragmatic which means people believe that truth depends very much on situation,
context and time. They show an ability to adapt traditions easily to changed
conditions, a strong propensity to save and invest and perseverance in
achieving results. We notice this and in our video we explain clearly why we
have to change and how we can change, it paves the way for the audience access
to the underlying spirit of video: make every sip count and it won’t be too
difficult to achieve these benefits, just responsible decision.
What’s your Choice!
After all,
we hope you remember “Every sip changes the world” then you have to “Go Starbucks!”
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