The wrong kind of unforgettable.
The Art & Science of Memorability
Starbucks Korea are making their staff sit through history lessons on 22nd June.
Sounds great on paper right? A brand investing in its people, taking culture seriously. Except the reason why is less Starbucks and more Starwhoops.
They ran a promotion and called it Tank Day. Launched it on the anniversary of the Gwangju massacre — when paratroopers killed hundreds of pro-democracy protesters in 1980. The slogan was "thwack on the desk," which in Korea echoes a police cover-up for a student tortured to death in custody.
You can guess the rest.
The campaign lasted hours. The CEO was gone the same day. Then the boycotts, the smashed mugs on the news, a chairman bowing three times on live television, two thousand stores shutting for that mandatory history lesson, and a reported $1.4m gone in an afternoon.
So what happened? A mix of trust in AI and no human eye. The marketers asked a tool for ideas. It gave them some. Nobody in the room felt the weight of what came back — some never even opened the attachments.
AI has its merits we can all agree on that. It’s changed the face of many an industry, workflows, operations, research, getting you off a blank page. Genuinely useful.
But you cannot beat a human eye. The thinking, the gut, the bit that reads a date and goes cold. AI gave Starbucks a phrase. It couldn't give them the one person in the room who'd lived in that country long enough to know what it meant. That's not the tool failing. It was never the tool's job.
Every brand on earth is fighting to be remembered. At every touchpoint, in every feed, all of it. So here's the thing worth chewing on: in that fight, do you really want to hand the wheel to something that can't see where it's steering?
Starbucks Korea are now totally unforgettable. Just not the way they planned.
Being remembered for the right reasons isn't luck. It's what happens when human judgement sits over the work — the thinking that knows what a brand should mean to the people it's trying to reach and what it should never say. That's the whole job at The Behaviours Agency. We use the tools we just never let them have the last word.
It's the thinking behind our Create Fame program — finding the distinctive move that makes a brand stick, then building the presence that keeps it there. Memorable for the right reasons.
