Schafer: There was a method to Starbucks' madness

After watching the storm of criticism that engulfed Starbucks and its "Race Together" campaign, it's no real mystery why so few corporations risk any sort of direct involvement in social issues.

And if that's the only lesson to be learned by this episode — shut up and stick to business — then "Race Together" was even more disappointing than its harshest critics said it was.

By now nearly anyone with an Internet connection or TV knows that Seattle-based Starbucks on Sunday discontinued its brief practice of having its staff mark "race together" on cups and then slide them across the counter to customers. The idea was simply hoping customers would see "race together" and then maybe ask what it's about, sparking a brief conversation about racial inequality.

This practice lasted about a week. Anyone in corporate public relations must have felt like it was month.

In a brief note to the staff last weekend, founder and CEO Howard Schultz allowed that "we didn't expect universal praise." He obviously didn't expect what he got, which was near universal criticism and derision.

"Let's give Howard Schultz credit," the HBO satirist John Oliver said on his show. "He did start a conversation across the racial divide, with a white billionaire pitching an idea, and any number of African-American customers telling him how stupid it was."

Others noted that this was an odd campaign for a company led by an executive group overwhelmingly made up of white executives.

Much of the criticism of this campaign clearly sticks, with "multiple reasons why this one doesn't feel right," said Carlos Torelli, associate professor at the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota, who has studied corporate social responsibility programs.

It is surprising to him, for starters, that the company undertook a campaign that really wasn't feasible. How is a barista going to tackle this topic? With complete strangers? In under a minute?

Customers understand and can support initiatives that fit with the company's business or brand, Torelli said. For Starbucks it would be something like what's known as fair trade coffee — good for the coffee farmers and good for the Starbucks brand with a big slice of consumers.

That's the other odd thing about the Starbucks campaign, he said. Racial inequality is an atypical choice for a corporate "social responsibility" initiative.

These are increasingly common, with downloadable reports on many a corporate website. For Ecolab, based in St. Paul, the latest report covers everything from reducing energy usage to encouraging safer driving of its fleet of vans to the work it's doing with ­customers to reducing clean water consumption.

What makes the case of Starbucks interesting is that it's taken on an issue that fits easily into no corporate social responsibility report. Not at Starbucks or any other company.

It's also not the first time the company has picked up an issue that didn't have much to do with retailing coffee. At its big investor day conference in Seattle in December, for example, Starbucks started its presentation with a short video on the challenges faced by military veterans and their families.

That was "an unconventional way to begin an investor conference," Schultz explained a few minutes later. "But, in fact, for all of us at Starbucks, it's who we are and what we believe in."

The investor conference went on for hours, with detailed plans upon detailed plans, but when Schultz himself had the floor, he talked only about what he would want to know if he were an investor — what it takes take to build "a great enduring company."

That's when any investor would've had to realize that taking on a seemingly unrelated social issue does have a sound business purpose.

He said he couldn't think of any company more dependent on the goodwill of individual consumers and on the ability of its people behind the counter to deliver great service.

"We've said for many, many years that we're not in the coffee business serving people; we're in the people business serving coffee," he said. "We have to bring our people along with us and have to demonstrate to them every single day that they are part of something larger than themselves."

There is no way of really knowing what employees thought about their company after being asked to scrawl "race together" on paper cups. What they had to know, of course, was that it couldn't have been anyone's idea of a short-term plan to boost sales.

What Starbucks has clearly figured out is that when people come to work understanding that they really are part of something with more of a purpose than ringing the cash register, that can make a difference in how they treat the customers walking in the door.

And then the cash register rings.