I recently came across the story about Starbucks Korea and did the thing I imagine a lot of people did. I read it twice, winced, and wondered (and to be fair, not for the first time), how a decision like that gets all the way to launch without a single person in the room putting their hand up.
For anyone who missed it: Starbucks Korea, one of the company’s biggest and best-performing markets outside the US, ran a campaign built around May 18th – the anniversary of the Gwangju uprising, when hundreds of pro-democracy demonstrators were killed by their own government in 1980. This is not an obscure event, buried in history, this is a date people mark every single year. And somehow it sailed through planning, approval, and launch without anyone stopping it.
The bit everyone’s getting slightly wrong
Most of the coverage calls this a marketing blunder, a slip, but I’d push back on that a little. This wasn’t a clumsy slogan or a bad translation; those happen, they’re forgivable, everyone’s had a “did we really send that email” moment. This was something else.
Nobody in that approval chain seemed to own a history book, or if they did, nobody thought to open it. That’s not a wording problem. That’s a “how did this get past every single person whose job it was to notice” problem.
Why a wealth manager is talking about a coffee cup
I should say upfront that I have no intention of reviewing anyone’s marketing deck. That’s not my job, and frankly not my talent either. But stories like this have a funny way of turning up in conversations I do have, because what starts as a cringe-worthy headline has a habit of becoming a financial one.
From cringe to consequence
Which is exactly what happened here: stores closed, leadership changed. This was a genuinely bad few weeks for a listed company, and not because of coffee prices, or interest rates, or anything you’d normally read about in a results announcement. Because of a decision that had nothing to do with the business of selling coffee at all. That’s the bit worth considering. The damage wasn’t operational. It was entirely self-inflicted, and entirely avoidable.
And before anyone thinks this was a one-off, it isn’t. A few years ago, a major fashion house managed to cause a genuine storm in China with an ad campaign widely seen as mocking, rather than celebrating, local culture. Different country, different industry, same underlying failure: a global brand assuming its instincts would travel, without checking first whether they really would.
What this means if you’ve actually got money in the world
Here’s where I have an opinion. If you hold a big, familiar, seemingly boring global brand in a portfolio somewhere, it’s tempting to file it under “safe.” Household name. Decades of trading. Coffee, of all things – hardly controversial. Then a fortnight like this happens, and the share price and the leadership team both have a very different month to the one anyone budgeted for.
I’m not suggesting anyone start second-guessing every consumer brand they own over a marketing campaign. That would be exhausting, and slightly unhinged. But cultural fluency – genuinely understanding a market, not just operating in it – is turning into something closer to a risk factor than a nice-to-have.
The old checklist for “safe” used to be simple: big balance sheet, strong brand, decades of trading history. None of that tells you whether the people running a campaign in a market twelve time zones from head office actually understood what they were launching. Particularly across Asia, where history and identity sit much closer to the surface of daily life than a lot of head offices seem to appreciate.
Where I’ve landed, for what it’s worth
I don’t have a tidy lesson to hand over here, other than the obvious one. Understanding a place properly – not the postcode version, the real one – turns out to matter more than people like to admit. Whether you’re launching a product or building a life in a country you’ve moved halfway across the world to call home.
Worth thinking about, either way.
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