The Red Cup Wars

As we took the time yesterday to learn about Meredith Davis’ message cycle, I thought of an incredibly relevant and reasonable example to share. The below explains how a simple marketing statement took on millions of assumed meanings that developed strictly over the internet: The Red Cup.

Every November 1st since what seems like the dawn of time, Starbucks has released a Christmas cup to ring in the holiday season. It will usually be colorful, with decorative holiday symbols familiar to us Americans. Holly, ornaments, and pine trees were on past holiday cups. In 2015 however, this was not the case.

To everyone’s surprise, Starbucks released a plain red cup.

Millions of people took to the internet retaliating with tweets, asking why it was so out of the ordinary to write ‘Merry Christmas’ on the cup? Most people took Starbucks’ stunt to inadvertently bash Christians and their holiday, when that was not the case at all. Starbucks claimed the blank design was intended for doodling. Never the less, popular stars such as Joshua Feurestein asked viewers to shout ‘Merry Christmas’ at Starbucks baristas and record the results with a special hashtag. As you can well imagine, this trend went viral, especially on FaceBook.

Meanwhile on Twitter, everyone from famous to infamous posted their interpretive opinion of the cups meaning. Memes started popping up about the cup, and it even received attention from actors like Rob Lowe and Donald Trump. The news eventually picked up on this and informed the more general public of the controversy.

Like all memes, the Red Cup Controversy died out. All was quiet, as people drew their attention to another less-than-unimportant subject.

Then, in November 2016, Starbucks released the ‘Unity Cup.’ This pictured a bunch of hand-drawn faces from all different ethnicities and cultures on a green background. Absolutely no mention of any holiday or celebration, to ‘remind everyone of our shared values,’ according to Starbucks’ CEO.

The backlash was incredible. Millions asked Starbucks to just ‘sell coffee’ and ‘not push a liberal agenda.’ When they’d been trying to please everyone, they dug the whole from 2015 even deeper.

The cultural impacts were astounding, causing many to boycott Starbucks (at least for the holiday season.) To think a marketing scheme would become such a universally-recognized meme!

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