Task 3- Appraisal

Social media is today’s most transparent, engaging and interactive form of public relations. In today’s society social media is the shift of how we get our information and what is happening around the world, it allows us to find people with the same interests and connect and share content with individuals. Social media is crucial in today’s society; it flattens out the world and gives us access to people that we would never have met otherwise. Within our group we chose Starbucks and the hashtag #redcupselfie as our creative campaign. The combination of social media and Starbucks fit perfectly as they are both associated with a younger up and coming audience that are present with the use of social media. The iconic snaps of the Starbucks drink are uploaded to Instagram daily featuring the hashtag of #redcups to show the festive drinks. Our creative idea was to change the traditional hashtag into #redcupselfie; we thought that this hashtag would be very successful on Twitter and Instagram as selfies have become a popular and iconic way of representing yourself on social media. Therefore, by incorporating the red cups and a selfie together in one picture it would have a bigger impact on audiences into purchasing the festive drink as individuals who have interest in both social media and Starbucks will want to follow the trend and hashtag their own festive drink onto their social media page.

The creative ideas that we have chosen for our campaign suit our chosen digital platform as using a hashtag is a current activity that millions of people on social media are using. By encouraging people to use the hashtag ‘redcupselfie’, it can help get Starbucks’ new festive drinks get trending all around the world as people are connected globally via social media. These trends help bring people together as people can view other peoples red cup selfies via the hashtag and this promotes Starbucks as it will appear on ‘current trends’.

Another form of social media that we will be using for our digital platform is Snapchat. Snapchat often do live stories of events where the public can add their own snaps to a global story which everyone can view. We will use a live story called ‘redcupselfie’ where Snapchat-users can take their own selfie with their festive drinks and upload it for everyone to see. This is ideal for social media because Snapchat is an extremely popular social platform and therefore this will help spread the word for Starbucks.

We expect our target audience to respond in a positive way and become excited about the new selfie trend that we have introduced. Starbucks’ festive drinks are also a campaign that the public look forward to every year, so joining the idea of the drinks and the selfie together, which is also a current trending activity, will hopefully elicit a global buzz. This response will then boost Starbucks’ sales as people will want to join in the trend and try out the new flavours.

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