Copyright Bloomberg
This kind of transformation would be difficult for any company to pull off but it’s especially so for Starbucks, which helped kick off the era of corporate activism. Its former longtime CEO Howard Schultz, who all but founded the company, weighed in on issues like gun control and political gridlock. He once told shareholders that those who opposed his support of same-sex marriage were free to invest elsewhere. He masterminded the company’s effort (albeit a disastrous one) to get customers to talk about race. He pledged to hire 10,000 refugees after President Donald Trump 1.0’s 2017 Muslim-majority countries travel ban. The company once took out full-page ads calling for a “willingness to unite despite our differences” that didn’t once mention coffee. Schultz was so overtly political that he was always chased by rumors that he would run for president. For more than a decade, the Starbucks model of articulating a company’s point-of-view on cultural and political issues was best practice in corporate communications, says Alison Novak, a professor of public relations and advertising at Rowan University.
