Beyond authenticity: A visual-material analysis of locality in the global redesign of Starbucks stores

In this article we examine the global store design strategy launched by Starbucks in 2009 in the wake of the economic crisis, increasing brand dilution, and growing competition. We offer a visual-material analysis of the corporation’s efforts to create a global aesthetic grounded in locality, with an in-depth focus on meaning potentials of materiality and community found across the four store redesigns that were unveiled in Seattle, the coffee company’s hometown, and which functioned as prototypes for store design across the United States, Europe, and Asia. We then critically engage Starbucks’ rhetoric/discourse of locality in relation to the more widespread notion of authenticity. We argue that while authenticity is rooted in textual and symbolic arrangements, locality operates in the realm of emplaced and embodied claims of difference. Shifting from authenticity to locality in design and branding practices alters critical engagements and everyday relationships with global consumer capitalism, insofar as this may be increasingly entrenched with vernacular expressions of cosmopolitanism.