Cultural Homogenization In Starbucks

Being interested in economics, I have always viewed international activities of multinational corporations as an appropriate topic for research. Recently I read an article about the increased consumption of coffee throughout the world. I was surprised by the fact that people spend a relatively big part of their income on espresso beverages sold by specific coffee house chains because of the social status associated with their products. According to Starbucks Corporation Fiscal 2013 Annual Report, the consolidated revenues of the company amounted to a record $14.9 billion.

Howard Schultz, chairman and CEO of Starbucks, states that one of the rationales behind the global expansion of the company is to popularize the “Starbucks experience”. The

According to advocates of this idea, global brands are Trojan horses used by multinational corporations to destroy cultural identities (qtd. in Arsel and Thompson 632).“The Starbucks Brandscape and Consumers’ (anticorporate) Experiences of Glocalization”byCraig J. Thompson and Zeynep Arsel puts the premium on the process of “glocalization” (qtd. in Arsel and Thompson 631) as a more accurate description of the amalgamation of international companies and local cultures. The coalescence produces a range of local meanings of global brands (qtd. in Arsel and Thompson 631).Arsel and Thompson advance the theory of “hegemonic brandscape” (Arsel and Thompson 632) to entirely analyze the effects of glocalization. They consider two types of coffee shop consumption at a local level and examine the structural facets of the Starbucks brandscape. The article elucidates anticorporate identifications enacted in the monopolistic brandscape by “oppositional localists” and “café flaneurs” (Arsel and Thompson 632).Arsel and Thompson underscore some limitations of their analysis stimulating additional investigation of certain aspects of their work. For this reason, I intend to investigate additional ways in which coffee shops may be encountered as they are not surely restricted to café flaneurship and opposional localism. Moreover, the research should differentiate between the attitude of loyal Starbucks customers towards hegemonic brandscape and that of local coffee shop patrons because the perception of the company is casually connected with the cultural