We
are very glad to receive so many insightful comments and in order to further
discuss about this topic; We would like to add some thoughts here:
The
most frequently points mentioned in their comments is the recent exposure of
cruel treatment toward civets but due to the time
constraints, we did not put too many pictures in the video. It refers to the
beans of coffee berries once they have been eaten and egested by the Asian palm
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
forced to feed the coffee beans. It’s one of the most expensive coffee in the
world as high as hundreds US dollars per pound. The huge consumption and
lucrative profit drive the market crazily and directly lead to the miserable
life of the civets. Actually, the label does not incorporate any information
about animal treatment but we feel obligated to add the story and encourage
people to rethink their decisions while buying a cup of coffee.
Another
fierce debate regarding our video is about the inconsistency about environment problems
(deforestation, water pollution and contamination) caused by planting coffee
beans and environment protections activities directed by LEED certification. It’s
no doubt for some business; development has to be based on the sacrifice of environment
for example automation, manufacturing and etc. It is inevitable but responsible
companies always try to minimize the negative effect and attempt to make up
like our case. Starbucks realizes the deforestation or contamination is unlikely
to eliminate, however the company can improve the situation through cultivating
its partners and train the farmers to plant in a more environmental friendly
way. Additionally, it can improve its internal process though applying LEED
certification to save energy and water. Even if their effort cannot achieve zero
damage to environment but it deludes its negative impact.
There
are some readers criticizing the so-called label is only marketing in order to persuade
more people to consume its products, because indeed, it still keep making money
based on those problems. Let’s try to think in company’s position, what is the responsibility
of a company at all? Score profit, customer satisfaction, social responsibility
and etc? The answers are driven by who are authentic shareholders. A responsible
company can define its shareholders in broad perspective, make profit to satisfy
investors, keep the company surviving and compensate the employee, produce
minimum pollution to protect community as well as high quality products to meet
the customer’s needs. Successful and sustainable business should be based on
the balance of all shareholders as mentioned. Therefore, for these opponents,
we encourage them to rethink in company’s stand and in a word, company’s success can facilitate society’s success
as Wangshi (the CEO of biggest real
estate company in China) said.
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 whereasfor “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 inbattery 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 Persuasionand 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!”
References
1. Big Room Inc, Ecolabel Index (retrieved on13 March 2014)
2. Brendan McSweeney, Hofstede’s model of national cultural and
their consequences: A triumph of faith – a failure of analysis (retrieved on
12 March 2014)
3. Cheryl Leo, Dr.
Rebekah Bennett, Professor Charmaine EJ Härtel, Cross-cultural Differences in Consumer Decision-Making Styles,
2005 (retrieved on 12 March 2014)
6. Constance Classen and
David Howes , Overview of Research on the
Globalization of the Consumer Society, Department of Anthropology and
Sociology, Concordia University (retrieved on 12 March 2014) http://www.david-howes.com/CultCon/OverView.htm
7. David K Tse, Russell
W. Belk & Nan Zhou, Becoming a
Consumer Society: A Longitudinal and Cross-Cultural Content Analysis of Print
Ads from Hong Kong, the People’s Republic of China and Taiwan (retrieved on
10 March 2014)
8. David K. Tse, John K
Wong, Cin Tiong Tan, Towards some
Standardized Cross-Cultural Consumption Values, Association for Consumer
Research website (retrieved on 9 March 2014)
Maggie Tang, from MSOCM, I am
working in the administrative areas. As I would like to strengthen my
supervisory skills and to keep myself up to date about the business world,
therefore I enrolled into this course, I hope I could learn more management
knowledge and become a competent person in the competitive business
environment.
Kelly Wong, student of MSCOM. I am
working in Talent development field. I wish I can learn knowledge, skills and
tools in team building, negotiation and conflict management though this program
me. These are the competencies of manager to drive the team performance.
Lynn Xia, also student from
MSCOM. I have engineering bachelor and 3 years working experience in a MNC and
domestic company, about management I had very few knowledge comparing to the
experienced classmates, so cannot wait to learn from them……..
(2) Group Name - Wood (木)
In the Chinese characters, there are 3 interesting words:木(wood
or tree)，林(more
than 2 trees, several trees)，森(forest,
large area covered with trees), from the shape and the interpretation of the 3
words, we can get a hint from our ancestors who create those world which is :
Collaboration is always more than
the mathematics sum of individuals. Our
logo: “W” is the begging letter of the world
wood. What does it
mean? We believe that 1 piece of wood
could only work things out with minimal benefits, however, with the “cluster of
trees”, it becomes a forest. Forest, as we
all know, it is with great importance to the world, not only it could balance
the climate of the world, but also provides the basic needs to human being,
like building houses.
We think the other
way round, applying what we mentioned above of how useful of “cluster of trees”
in an organization. We believe that 1
person could not achieve an organization’s goals, however, with the “cluster of
persons” working together, an organization could work things out.
Our logo, using
the letter “W”, it consists of 2 letters “V”, “V”
means victory, so “W” here, we interpret as “win-win” as our group’s logo,
that is, the expectation from the people of what collaboration is.
(3)Group
goal for this class
Negotiation and creating values
among individuals
Persuading and influencing others
among group and organizations.
Design high collaboration team (team
members and accountability system) and how to maintain the team.
Resolving Conflicts among Groups and
organizations
Managing and Preventing Crisis by
Cultivating Mindfulness & Resilience
Some best practice of encouraging
collaboration from your global perspective
The sense of collaboration is different
among different generation, for instance the 90s is quite different from 80s
and 70s, and how do we think of the difference, positive or negative side? Is
it necessary to cultivate them and train them on collaboration and how?
How to work out collaboration across
the board in a company
An organization strives to succeed
in achieving its goal, how to work it out, it is easy, just to get the people
to work together unanimously, that is what “collaboration” means. With a team to collaborate wholeheartedly,
the organization could then pave the way to succeed.
It is easy to say that people could
work together, in reality, is it true?
As people have their own values, perspectives and goals, do they wish to
share with others. Don’t forget that: every
one of us is
working in a highly competitive environment; everyone would strive for the best
for themselves. Does
collaboration really easily to work it out in an organization – it’s food for
thought!!
