AWSI Musings: Fly the Red Coffee Cup - Created by You…

Created by you. Starbucks unveils 13 red cup “holiday works of art” selected from customer submissions. Looks like a wonderful new holiday tradition…

The Starbucks Holiday Red Cups are G-r-r-r-e-a-t!

Sorry for dragging Tony the Tiger into this follow-on Red Cup story, but his catch phrase really fits the bill here.

So last week we wrote about the build-up to the unveiling of the seasonal red cups at Starbucks.

This week we are tipping the cap to those folks for taking something that was so controversial and turning it into a new holiday tradition.

They invited customers to share designs on Instagram and were inundated with more than 1,200 individual submissions from 13 countries representing “the collective spirit of the holidays around the world.”

Somehow they managed to narrow down the selection to 13 customer designs from six countries. These cups can now be found in more than 25,000 Starbucks stores in 75 countries. Talk about great visibility for the artists.

You can find details in this 1912Pike post.

Some notable quotables:

also this:

We were surprised and inspired by the amount of incredible art submitted by our customers. The designs were beautiful, expressive and engaging. We quickly realized there was potential to use the customer-created art for our holiday cups…

Take a look at me now…

We agree and applaud their efforts.

The ad guy (at AdFreak) had this to say:

They are pretty, and like plain red cups, relatively harmless (though people seem to get riled up about pretty much any Starbucks cup these days). The fact is, though, it probably doesn’t matter much, either way. Starbucks can count on sleepless Americans buying a lot more coffee this December, regardless.

Yeah, we say, #whatevs.

AWSI, turning a negative into a positive is a huge win for Starbucks. Still, in our mind, Starbucks is kind of like… corporate coffee. At the end of the day, it comes down to “what’s inside.”

Here’s a 30-second cup unveiling.