The Starbucks Brandscape and Consumers

The Starbucks Brandscape and Consumers '
(Anticorporate) Experiences of Glocalization
CRAIG J. THOMPSON
ZEYNEP ARSEL*
Prior studies strongly suggest that the intersection of global brands and iocal cultures produces cultural heterogeneity. Little research has investigated the ways in which global brands structure these expressions of cultural heterogeneity and consumers ' corresponding experiences of glocalization. To redress this gap, we develop the construct of the hegemonic brandscape. We use this theoretical lens to explicate the hegemonic influence that Starbucks exerts upon the sociocultural milieus of local coffee shops via its market-driving servicescape and a nexus of oppositional meanings (i.e., the anti-Starbucks discourse) that circulate in popular culture. This hegemonic brandscape supports two distinctive forms of local coffee shop experience through which consumers, respectively, forge aestheticized and politicized anticorporate identifications.

izing corporate capitalism (Falk 1999; Klein 1999). AntiStarbucks slogans, culture-jamming satires of the Starbucks logo, and impassioned indictments of the company 's business practices occupy many comers of the Internet, providing meeting points for myriad cybercommunities.
Academic researchers have also entered into this cultural conversation about the consequences of globalization. For proponents of tbe homogenization thesis, global brands are
Trojan horses through which transnational corporations colonize local cultures (e.g., Falk 1999; Ritzer 1993). In recent years, anthropological studies have built a strong empirical case that, contrary to the homogenization thesis, consumers often appropriate the meanings of global brands to their own ends, creatively adding new cultural associations, dropping incompatible ones, and transforming others to fit into local cultural and lifestyle pattems (Hannerz 1996; Miller 1998a).
From this perspective, the interjection of global brands into

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