Bearings

Autumn is upon us, which means the return of Starbucks’ Pumpkin Spice Latte. It’s also Ramadan, and for its customers in the Middle East, Starbucks has created a new drink it hopes becomes a Ramadan tradition — the Date Frappuccino.

It would seem like a real blunder, maybe even cultural insensitivity, for Starbucks to market a new food product just for the month of Ramadan — the month Muslims fast from sunrise to sunset. But Starbucks executives seem to think this caffeinated version of “think globally, act locally” strikes the right marketing balance.

Starbucks, now with 200 stores in the Middle East (mostly in oil-rich Gulf countries), has operated in the region since 1999 with the help of a trading partnership from the region. MH Alshaya, a Kuwaiti-owned retail specialist company, has also helped H&M, The Body Shop and Foot Locker become established throughout the Middle East.

Starbucks Middle East Marketing Manager Antoun Abou Jaoude emphasized the company’s intention in this release. “The new Date Frappuccino reflects a beverage that has been created for the first time specifically for our Middle East customers and we hope it is enjoyed throughout Ramadan,” he said.

It’s not just the Date Frappuccino. Starbucks has also created the Pistachio Date Cake and the Almond & Date Delight as pairings for the new drink, all of which is a step up from last year’s holiday addition: decorative cups, like the ones U.S. customers find around the winter holidays.

With the changes, questions arise: With only a few hours between sunset and the end of the business day, when would there be time? And why would Starbucks dream up a product with severely limited purchase opportunities?

Anti-globalization activists often accuse Starbucks of cultural homogenization — a monoculture is being developed by opening a Starbucks on every busy street corner at the expense of local culture. Starbucks Chairman Howard Schultz freely admits, “At our core, we’re a coffee company, but the opportunity we have to extend the brand is beyond coffee; it’s entertainment.” And that entertainment translates into culture, of course, when it extends to books, music and films, all carefully selected to appeal to Starbucks’ target consumer.

Aside from minor architectural differences, one can walk into any one of 12,000 Starbucks in the world and feel right at home: the same bistro tables, the same overstuffed velvety chairs, the same Starbucks vernacular that would allow one to order a venti-something, all without a translator. It’s a one-size fits every town kind of place, and the strategy has worked well, albeit with some controversy.

When Starbucks breezed into Paris in 2004, making few accommodations for French culture, the company met rhetorical resistance. Long lines at the cafe, however, contradicted the outcry. The concern among the French was that one of their cultural centerpieces — cafe society — would be transformed, if not diminished, when put face-to-face with the world’s most recognizable coffee company.

Like France, Middle Eastern countries celebrate a long-lived coffeehouse culture. The region is, after all, home of the Arabica coffee bean. One of the world’s oldest coffeehouses, Feshawi’s, still exists in Cairo’s 500-year-old Khan el-Khalili market.

This time around, Starbucks has employed a different strategy in the Middle East: cultural localization. The new Frappuccino contains the juice of the culturally significant date, to make, according to Abou Jaoude, “the first culturally localised beverage to be crafted for the Middle East.” Starbucks is also making available, “for a limited period,” a selection of “traditional Arabian coffees,” essentially packaging and reselling an indigenous commodity — the world’s second largest — as “traditional.”

Cultural localization is not an accidental term. Its origins stem from the tech industry in the 1990s and the efforts made to address the difficulties of software and web developers who found that linguistic translation wasn’t enough. Instead, cultural localization, as it came to be known, took into consideration cultural factors so that the logic of a website would make sense and be more intuitive to navigate as it moved from one culture to another. Marketing later adapted this term to mean products and promotional campaigns would be developed to resonate culturally.

Starbucks, which finds its business not only in coffee but also in entertainment and culture, has taken the idea in a new direction. The development of a culturally localized product not only suggests a move away from the cultural homogenization that Starbucks is typically charged with, but it also shows how Starbucks transforms consumer culture.

Instead of traditionally breaking the fast at sunset by sharing communal meals at the homes of friends, family and neighbors, Starbucks hopes Muslims in the Middle East will head to the mall and opt for an individualized, frozen blended drink with whipped cream.