Consumers to Starbucks: Just the coffee, please

Yesterday Starbucks announced it is going to start talking about race with customers in its new "Race Together" campaign. 

At LikeFolio, we can instantly see how real consumers are reacting to things like this, so we decided to take a look.

In the past 24 hours…

• There were 24,000 tweets about the program vs the normal 4k tweets per day about Starbucks
  
• Most of them came from women
  
• Most came from New York, Delhi, Chicago, London and L.A.
  

Commonly used words in the tweets were "barista", "white people", "racist", "funny" and "backlash."

A vast majority of the tweets were of negative sentiment, which is unusual for Starbucks as their sentiment scores are generally pretty high.

Summary:  

The Race Together campaign got Starbucks a social volume jump, but not the kind you want to have, as it was combined with a sentiment drop of epic proportions.  

The fact that Starbucks intentionally went out of its way to create such an unwelcome campaign (as opposed to your typical scandal) is pretty stunning for a company so revered for its branding and PR prowess.

Based on the consumer reaction we're seeing, we think it'd be smart for Starbucks to call this race over.

— Andy Swan is the founder of LikeFolio, which searches all of Twitter for important shifts in consumer behavior around the brands owned by publicly-traded companies.