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The purpose of this paper is to use the concept of brand hate as part of an exploratory study in order to investigate the antecedents and consequences of extreme negative affect within the food category.

The authors employed a mixed research design. A short survey of 324 French business school students identified Starbucks as the most hated food brand (measured in terms of frequency of mentions). In total, 14 semi-structured interviews were conducted with participants who had identified Starbucks as a hated brand.

The research study found that not all consumers feel brand hate at the same level and so-called haters expressed differing severity of hate towards Starbucks, i.e. cold, warm and hot brand hate. Findings revealed that the antecedents of extreme negative affect are to a certain extent dependent on the intensity of brand hate. Consumer reactions were discussed in terms of attachment–aversion relationships which were categorised according to soft and hard brand hate.

Future research is required to broaden the conceptual scope of brand hate as a construct and apply it in other domains of research, as well as further clarify antecedents and potential outcomes. The authors accept that the study is limited and specific to Starbucks in France. Further research should therefore broaden the scope of context in which brand hate occurs, for example, expanding the geographical scope of the work to other countries and to other food- and drink-related brands. The authors also accept that the study reflects a relatively homogeneous sample and is thus not representative of the general population.

Brand managers need to recognise the risk that brand hate will not only distance former customers, but also spread to existing and future customers. Food brand executives need to therefore consider approaches to address the causes and effects of brand hate.

Brand hate within the literature is a very recent phenomenon and studies remain rare. The rise of the so-called activist consumer is an emerging phenomenon within the food sector. The discussion of brand hate within a food context represents a new avenue of research.

The paper aims to increase the understanding of reputational-risk management by examining company responses to potentially reputation-damaging incidents.

Incidents with potential for damaging Starbucks Corporation’s reputation were described and summarized as were the company’s responses to those incidents.

It was observed that the complexity of resolving a reputation-damaging incident was inversely related to its closeness to the company’s core business. Also, the longevity of incidents suggests the persistent influence of past events.

Limitations are that findings are not generalizable beyond this case study and that the bulk of the information collected pertained to one of the five incidents examined. Potential hypotheses for future research are suggested.

Findings provide reference points and a context for managers responding to reputation-damaging incidents.

The paper illustrates how reputation-damaging incidents can be complex and difficult to resolve the more removed they are from the company’s core business.

This paper aims to describe how coffeehouse chain Starbucks has teamed up with Arizona State University (ASU) to offer a big discount on online undergraduate education for 135,000 employees.

It outlines the origins of the Starbucks college achievement plan, the form it takes and the aims it seeks to achieve.

It explains that employees admitted to ASU as a junior or senior earn full tuition reimbursement for each semester of full-time coursework they complete toward a bachelor’s degree. Students already in their first or second years of study are eligible for a partial tuition scholarship and need-based financial help for two years of full-time study. Employees do not have to carry on working at Starbucks after graduation.

It reveals that the Starbucks investment is designed to support the nearly 50 per cent of college students in the USA today who fail to complete their degrees because of a mounting debt, a tenuous work-life balance and a lack of support.

It claims that the scheme can help to repair the fractured American dream.

It demonstrates how the Starbucks college achievement plan will provide an academic foundation along with the flexibility, financing and support that working students need to complete their degree.

The purpose of this paper is to unveil the true background of the Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) Project and to suggest crucial indexes for bringing a movement into a future ceiling causing a struggle of the international tax system.

This paper looks into the historical context of this project before and after Starbucks’ scandal, comparing to other contexts of the international tax system. Also, this paper partially reviews BEPS from a legal perspective.

The key factors for building momentum of reform of international taxation are a country having a government willing to embrace the cause of reform, unfairness felt toward entities using tax avoidance schemes which other comparable entities could not be use, grass-roots pressure for the reform, effective places to negotiate cooperation among major countries for the reform, solid cooperation among many countries in the world to implement standards and rhetoric of slogan with less opposition.

The momentum of the reform of international taxation was analyzed before. But the BEPS Project has involved some unique events as compared with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s project on harmful tax practices, such as initiation of NGOs and boycott by consumers. Additionally, this paper will discuss insights, which the former research did not do.

Ethics is fundamentally a science of social and collective responsibility. Ethics concerns human behavior as responsible or accountable. Because of the nature of social interaction, certain members of the society will bear greater authority, and hence, greater individual and social responsibility than others. In our world, personal responsibility and social responsibility are hardly separable. Personal responsibility becomes responsibility for the world because the person and the world are inseparable. In this chapter, we use the term responsibility from a legal, ethical, moral, and spiritual (LEMS) standpoint as some promise, commitment, obligation, sanctioned by self, morals, law, or society, to do good, and if harm results, to repair harm done on another. Hence, responsibility from a moral perspective is trustworthiness and dependability of the agent in some enterprise. Its inverse is exoneration – the extent to which one is excused from commitment and repairing the harm done to others by one’s actions. We apply the theories and constructs of executive responsibility to two contemporary cases: (1) India’s Super Rich in 2014 and (2) the Fall and Rise of Starbucks. After exploring the basic notion of responsibility, we present a discussion on the nature and obligation of corporate responsibility into three parts: Part I: Classical Understanding and Discussion on Corporate Responsibility; Part II: Contemporary Understanding and Discussion on Corporate Responsibility, and Part III: A synthesis of classical and contemporary views of responsibility and their applications to corporate executive responsibility.

This paper highlights that the strategic use of design, a competitive pattern typically associated with creative industries, those creating and trading meanings, also characterizes industries that produce functional or utilitarian goods not typically considered creative. The paper explores the origins of this phenomenon in the context of three industry settings: cars, speciality coffee and personal computers. The analysis theorizes three distinct strategic paths that explain how design may become an institutionalized aspect of competition in industries that are not creative. We explain how firms link their products to the identities of their users, how design is linked to stakeholders' emotions and visceral reactions to products and how intermediaries are relevant to enhancing attention to design. Illuminating these strategic paths allows harnessing some of the well-established understandings about competition in creative industries towards understanding competition in noncreative industries.

This chapter theorizes the outrageous consumer response that may follow the communication of political corporate social responsibility (CSR). We consider two recent cases (Starbucks’s offer to hire refugees and Pepsi’s appropriation of protest movements in an ad) and how consumers-citizens reacted when these corporations communicated political issues. By drawing from psychoanalytic concepts, we illustrate how consumers’ outrage, expressed in angry social media comments, and in the creation and sharing of memes, is cathartic of unconscious repressed matter: the realization of their own powerless and the domination of corporations. We further note how these expressions of outrage may be understood to result from defense mechanisms such as denial, displacement, or more complex sublimation that help consumers maintain a position of passive domination by corporations. Like all psychoanalytic applications, our interpretation represents only a plausible metaphor that can explain the “irrational” behavior of consumers. Positivist traditions of CSR theorization may demand further causal studies to confirm the ideas we express. Our study is an original exploration of what underlies consumer responses to political CSR. These cases could inform academics and practitioners working in the business and society arena asking them to re-evaluate whether and how political CSR should be communicated, and the implications of the rapid diffusion of messages in social media that include mocking parody and offensive brand comments.

The brand management literature argues that the standardization of branding strategy across global markets leads to consistent and well‐defined brand meaning. The paper aims to challenge this thesis by empirically examining whether and how global brands travel with consumers. The paper studies how consumers create brand meanings at home and abroad as well as the impact of context (e.g. place) on the meaning of global brands for the same consumers.

The paper takes a qualitative approach to examine brand meanings for two prototypical global brands, McDonald's and Starbucks, at home and abroad. Data were collected through photo‐elicited interviews, personal diaries, and essays with 29 middle‐class American consumers before, during, and after a short‐term trip to China. Interviews lasted from 30 to 90 minutes and the data were analyzed using a hermeneutic approach.

Taking a cultural branding approach, the paper demonstrates that despite perceived standardized global brand platforms, consumers develop divergent brand meanings abroad. While at home, global brands have come to symbolize corporate excess, predatory intentions, and cultural homogenizations; abroad they evoke meanings of comfort, predictability, safety, and national pride. In foreign contexts, global brands become dwelling resources that enable travelers to sustain daily consumption rituals, evoke sensory experiences of home, as well as provide a comfortable and welcoming space.

The paper challenges the brand management literature assumption of a consistent brand image for standardized global brands. It shows that the cultural context (e.g. place) impacts consumer‐derived brand meanings even among the same group of consumers. Further, it argues that standardization offered by global brands provides an important symbolic value to mobile consumers of serving as an anchor to the home left behind.

As huge environmental impacts caused by the coffee industry are significant and controversial in the course from cultivation to consumption, the purpose of this paper is to investigate whether or not different types of green claims based on the product lifecycle can lead to different extents of green psychological variables including purchase intention.

The green claims of Starbucks were chosen as the research target for this study not only because the coffee chain store is working on the “Starbucks” Shared Planet’ program, which makes a commitment to do business in ways that are good for people and the planet, but also because such a program can be categorized into three major green message elements on the basis of the product lifecycle. A total of 920 valid self-reported questionnaires collected in Taiwan were used for this empirical analysis.

One-way ANOVA results reveal that all of the three green claims of Starbucks can lead to consumers building up the same level of green brand image of this company, with “ethical sourcing” significantly possessing more impacts on the other green psychological variables (i.e. green trust, green satisfaction, green brand equity, and green purchase intention).

The empirical results and findings from this study are helpful to the coffee industry marketers if they, in formulating various promotion campaigns, can communicate with the consumers with an eye to increasing their green brand image and other green psychological variables, including green purchase intention.

This study is among the first to introduce different types of green claims on a basis of the product lifecycle to examine whether or not consumers’ green psychological variables will be different.

For the brands that have managed to achieve worldwide fame and recognition, their prosperity has sewn them into popular culture and helped fashion them into icons of their time. Whether they are loved or hated, their influence remains undeniable. While recognition and riches on such a scale may be the dream of almost every budding entrepreneur, fame does not of course come without its costs. Giants like Microsoft, Coca‐Cola, Nike and McDonald’s continually face barrages of criticism – amplified by their global presence – where it appears no move can go unnoticed. But is it possible to achieve mega‐success yet remain as loved as a small company operating in a local market? And even more importantly, can growth be achieved whilst maintaining an ethically sound approach to business?