These people who are mad at Starbucks were mostly hired by Starbucks to publicly "attack" them, which fits in nicely to the "war on Christmas" narrative. People are attracted to the controversy and Starbucks gets tons of exposure.
It's similar to native advertising. Native advertising focuses on buying upvotes and planting comments and upvotes to make certain narratives look popular, which is frequent on reddit. But because people are naturally attracted to controversy, the story gets repeated everywhere, so they don't even have to buy upvotes. It's like sex, it sells. People are naturally drawn to it through some primal instincts, and they use that knowledge to draw people's attention to their product. The Starbucks "controversy" is on reddit, it's on facebook, people I know mentioned it in person.
The controversy is the commodity they use to attract viewers, but the controversy is largely falsely generated by Starbucks to attract attention. Most of the people being outraged come after the original falsified outrage paid for by starbucks has been aired on fox news or whatever. They hire a company to find these vocal christian loons and stir them up about this particular story and then give them an audience by allowing them to speak on tv about this particular issue. This fuels the controversy which drives views. It makes it look like there's a bunch of people who are seriously outraged about this thing, even though there might only be 5 in total and they're being handed microphones and given interviews left and right.
Most importantly, this type of "advertising through controversy" generates organic views (and organic community-driven upvotes and comments) from places like reddit who are amazed that the controversy exists in the first place and upvote it to mock those people fighting starbucks (who don't really exist in any large numbers in the first place). So "everyone" is laughing at "everyone" being pissed at a company, and meanwhile everyone is repeating "Starbucks" over and over and talking about their cup designs. It's advertising. People need to get real.
There are so many distracted ignorant people who are wasting so much time on simulated controversy and it's one big reason why our culture, society, and government are crumbling. They think they are looking at something that matters, but is in actuality completely unimportant. This is the circus of the modern day. These "organic" controversies, that are, in reality, largely advertising and distractions. You see this pattern everywhere once you start looking for it.
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Empire_of_the_mind ago
You are correct. They've used this technique several times in the past.
Phivex ago
Source?
Empire_of_the_mind ago
dude, this sort of thing is not in a fucking magazine article or a PLOS journal. You have to learn to think for yourself sometimes. Or study advertising a bit.
Phivex ago
I'm confused as to why you're coming across aggressive. I was simply asking for a source for your allegation. If anyone is going to say something, they should have the means to back it up, otherwise every allegation is a rumor with no evidence to support it. I prefer to make my decisions based on facts than rumors.
Empire_of_the_mind ago
are you autistic? it's socially awkward to aggressively doubt people. this is not a grandiose claim by any means, and it's clearly not the sort of thing that comes with a "source." It's the kind of thing you have to apply knowledge to information to understand. there may well be some trade rag in the advertising industry talking about Starbuck's successful use of this technique, but I'm not really in the mood to go hunting it down. It's rather self-evident. Any aggressiveness is an equal response to someone essentially asking for a source on "water is wet."
If you had said something like "Hey, this sounds outlandish and unreal, do you have any more information about this or are you just making shit up?" then i'd be more inclined to follow-up. "Source?" is an entitled response - I'm not a robot and I don't owe you shit. Believe it or not, or go research to find more info. That's how the world fucking works. You're welcome.
More seriously, this kind of shit is the forefront of advertising the past decade. The industry uses far more manipulation than the laymen would believe and I recommend learning about it - interesting stuff that helps you better understand your world. I can't recall the term for this particular technique but any one in advertising creative could tell you exactly. Look up "advertising nudging" for a start on what goes on. Check out this link from 1999 that gets into some of this - imagine how far it's gone (http://www.cnn.com/books/beginnings/9911/deadly.persuasion/)
Phivex ago
Wow dude. You have some serious anger issues. I bet people hate emailing or texting you.
Just because you infer a specific tone-of-voice to text, doesn't mean it was projected in that way. An entitled response would include no question mark. Because of the fact that mine had one, it implies I'm asking for a source instead of demanding one.
In all actuality, you only had to respond with a link or the last paragraph in your previous comment. Instead, you decided to waste your and my time in this frivolous argument. Thanks for the info and I hope you have a great day. Below are a couple of links that may help
Empire_of_the_mind ago
don't be such a pussy, life is hard and soft is no way to go through it. if you think i'm actually angry you're out of your mind.