Starbucks names Sharon Rothstein Global CMO

Starbucks names Sharon Rothstein Global CMO

Coffee giant Starbucks has plucked its new Global CMO from Sephora in Sharon Rothstein, who was SVP of marketing for the  will join the company in mid-April and won’t just be overseeing the marketing efforts of Starbucks, but also the company’s other brands, such as Seattle's Best Coffee, Evolution Fresh, La Boulange, Tazo and Teavana, Motley Fool reports.

“I have been a loyal Starbucks customer and fan for most of my adult life and I am humbled to become a partner (employee) at one of the few companies in the world that embraces the value and responsibility of balancing business performance and social impact,” she said in a press release. Rothstein will also oversee the company's Seattle's Best Coffee, Evolution Fresh, La Boulange, Tazo and Teavana brands.

The social conscience side of Starbucks also gets a boost from another big announcement this week: that it's buying its first coffee farm, a 600-acre spread in Costa Rica that will serve as the company's first global agronomy center and the center of its $70 million ethical sourcing program.

The bucolic farm (check it out below) is located in central Costa Rica on the slopes of the Poas Volcano, which has erupted 39 times since 1828, and will be used as “an agronomy research and development center working on climate change mitigation, long-term crop stability and other programs,”  the Seattle Times reports. 

It will help the chain provide other coffee farmers with training in such things as soil management, field-crop production and milling processes, and will also likely be used to develop new types of coffee. Starbucks has such farmer support centers in China, Colombia, Rwanda and Tanzania, but this will be the first time it has its own farm for experimenting.

This is all part of Starbucks’ billion-dollar commitment to ethically sourcing all of its coffee by 2015, a company release notes. “The opportunity this continued investment brings will ensure the most innovative resources are brought to bear for sustainability and resilience across all farming communities,” said Peter Seligmann, chairman and CEO of Conservation International, which has been working with Starbucks since 2008 on such issues.

Naming a global CMO is a change of strategy for Starbucks, too, which ditched its global CMO role in the summer of 2011, moving the exec then occupying that position, Annie Young-Scrivener, to run its Canada market in a bid to “decentralize executive management and appoint leadership according to global regions,” Adweek reports. A source tells the pub, though, that that “decentralized strategy has positively run its course.” Rothstein must be hoping this new global strategy doesn’t positively run its course anytime soon.

Source: Starbucks