ABSTRACT
Starbucks, the largest coffeehouse in the world, has been universally acclaimed as a miracle in the commercial empire. Its operation philosophy and operating paradigm as well as the ways to get enormous profits have been a debate in the academic field. A large number of scholars in the domains of marketing (i.e. Thompson and Arsel 2006), psychology (i.e. Michelli 2006), anthropology (i.e. Gaudio 2003), linguistics (i.e. Yang 2012), etc. have done many in-depth analyses of this commercial wonder from their own perspectives. They mainly discussed such issues as how the brand creates its own unique image, how consumers converse with each other in Starbucks, how Starbucks gets tremendous profits by designing a set of special mugs and labeling shocking prices, and so on and so forth. As for how Starbucks obtains its huge profits in Chinese markets, a Chinese scholar Yang (2012) gave a detailed analysis, but his analysis is carried out from the pragmatic perspective, and he, based upon pragmatic theories in linguistics, just analyzed how Starbucks realizes its amazing economic interests by employing some clever or even cunning strategies. Actually, we hold that Starbucks’ victory is not the matter of ‘coffee selling’, rather it is the victory of ‘a cultural sign’. Then how does this ‘cultural sign’ settle itself in Chinese markets and become an idiosyncratic icon? The present study will attempt to use semiotic theories, supplemented
Third, signs-creating is actually meaning-making. However, meaning here only refers to denotative meaning. Can signs have connotative meaning? How can signs create connotative meaning based upon the denotative meaning?
