When Personalization Feels Fake: Starbucks’ Cup Messages, AI, and the Quest for Genuine Connection

This Week’s Focus: Starbucks’ Personalization Faces Scrutiny

Starbucks’ recent initiative to enhance customer personalization—requiring baristas to write cheerful notes on every cup—has stirred significant debate. Critics argue that this move is blurring the lines between genuine personalization and marketing tactics. The issue grew when customers realized that these were not spontaneous gestures, but mandatory actions dictated by corporate policy. While the intention to make customers feel valued is commendable, the effectiveness of such personalization is closely tied to its authenticity. Today we explore studies in marketing, psychology, and organizational behavior that underscore the importance of meaningful engagement and genuine relationships between customers and brands and examine how AI and data-driven strategies can make or break the trust and loyalty many brands strive to achieve through personalization strategies.

A hand scribbled “Have a great day!” on a Starbucks cup might seem like a simple gesture with the power to brighten a customer’s morning and sweeten their (overly bitter and burnt) coffee.

But what happens when these gestures start to feel scripted rather than sincere?

A TikTok phenomenon.

Starbucks’ latest attempt at customer personalization, which requires baristas to write cheerful notes on every cup, has sparked debate about the fine line between meaningful personalization and hollow gestures in modern marketing and service operations.

In late 2024, Starbucks’ new CEO announced a back-to-basics initiative requiring baristas to write uplifting messages on each cup. A company representative stated that “handwritten notes on our cups have proven to be a simple, yet meaningful action that fosters moments of connection with our customers.”

However, employees voiced frustration about the impracticality during rush hours. The Economic Times reported that “Employees feel the initiative is impractical and exhausting, especially during peak hours,” noting many found it “unnecessary... [adding] needless pressure without real benefit.”

The backlash intensified when customers discovered these messages weren’t spontaneous acts of kindness but corporate mandates.

Let’s steam past the foam and get to the real story.

Understanding Expectation Confirmation Theory

My articles usually focus on operations, but occasionally I must reach across the aisle to marketing to better understand such personalization strategies.

To understand why Starbucks would even attempt this cup-message experiment, it’s important to grasp the strong allure of personalization in customer experience—and the equally strong risks when it rings false.

Decades of marketing research have shown that personalization, when done right, can significantly boost customer satisfaction, loyalty, and brand relationships.

Expectation Confirmation Theory (ECT), which was initially introduced by Oliver and explains how personalization works, posits that customers enter service encounters with expectations, which are compared to the actual experience. If the experience exceeds expectations (a positive confirmation), the customer is delighted; if it falls short (negative confirmation), the customer is disappointed.

A personal touch—like a barista remembering your usual order or giving a compliment—can exceed a customer’s baseline expectations, leading to greater satisfaction.

This is why companies have long trained employees to use customers’ names or engage in small talk: it adds a layer of interpersonal warmth that can positively disconfirm expectations in what might otherwise be an impersonal service process.

In Starbucks’ case, a thoughtful note on a cup could be the little surprise that makes a regular customer think, “Wow, they really care,” thus raising their satisfaction. Indeed, businesses that get personalization right see the payoff in metrics: one study found that companies excelling at personalization generate 40% more revenue than average competitors—a reflection of customers buying more and staying loyal when they feel valued as individuals.

Building on Oliver’s work on ECT, Santos and Boote expand expectation theory in their work “A theoretical exploration and model of consumer expectations, post‐purchase affective states and affective behaviour,” by introducing a hierarchy of expectations:

• The ideal (desired) level—what the customer hopes for.

• The predicted (expected) level—what the customer realistically anticipates.

• The minimum tolerable level—the lowest acceptable performance.

Their research emphasizes that post-purchase affective states (delight, satisfaction, acceptance, or dissatisfaction) depend on whether a service experience aligns with or deviates from these levels. If an interaction surpasses predicted expectations but stays within the zone of tolerance, it fosters satisfaction; if it exceeds even desired expectations, it can create delight.

This framework helps explain why Starbucks’ personalized cup messages might be effective—not only do they meet expectations, but they have the potential to exceed them, creating a moment of unexpected delight that strengthens customer affinity.

In the context of personalization, in their paper “The Effectiveness of Customized Promotions in Online and Offline Stores,” Zhang and Wedel examine how different levels of customization—mass-market, segment-specific, and individual-level—affect customer responses. Their findings highlight that while personalization can drive engagement, the incremental benefits of hyper-personalization (especially in offline settings) are often small, and excessive personalization could reduce effectiveness due to lower redemption rates in offline stores and potential privacy concerns.

Their research supports the idea that customization is most effective when it positively disconfirms expectations—when a customer receives a personalized offer that aligns with, but slightly exceeds, what they anticipated. However, over-customization, especially if perceived as intrusive, can create a negative effect.

This nuanced balance is relevant to Starbucks’ cup-message strategy: a simple, unexpected note can elevate the experience, but forced or overly frequent personalization may backfire, making the interaction feel contrived rather than authentic.

Relationship Marketing

This is connected to the broader concept of Relationship Marketing, which underpinned Starbucks’ strategy.

Relationship marketing is all about moving beyond single transactions to build a long-term bond between customer and company. It emphasizes customer retention, satisfaction, and loyalty over time.

Key to this approach is building trust and commitment in the relationship. Morgan & Hunt’s classic 1994 study highlights these as the twin pillars of relationship marketing. How does a company build trust with customers? By consistently demonstrating integrity, reliability, and genuine concern for the customer’s needs.

And indeed, Starbucks built its brand on creating the “third place” between home and work. The tradition of writing customer names on cups made each interaction feel more human and aligned with their relationship-driven approach.

This framework helps explain why Starbucks’ early personalization efforts, which felt organic and customer-centric, succeeded in building strong brand loyalty—writing a name, while inefficient and quirky, was part of the process.

So why is the current policy generating so much backlash?

Bol et al.’s study “Understanding the Effects of Personalization as a Privacy Calculus” examined how personalization influences online self-disclosure across health, news, and commerce contexts using a representative sample of 1,131 participants.

Their findings showed that personalization led to a 14% decrease in trust and an 8% reduction in perceived benefits. Moreover, while personalization had negligible effects on privacy risk perception, it marginally decreased the willingness to self-disclose. The paper highlights that when users perceive personalization to exceed their comfort levels, trust deteriorates, leading to significantly lower engagement and disclosure.

This reinforces that relationship marketing’s emphasis on authenticity means faking it can be worse than not doing it at all. Trust is fragile—it requires authenticity. If a personalization attempt is revealed to be disingenuous, it can erode trust faster than if no personalization was attempted.

The Starbucks cup fiasco is a case in point. The intent was to deepen relationships by showing care, but once customers perceived the care as forced, it didn’t feel caring anymore.

In terms of Expectation Confirmation Theory, the expectation of a genuine personal gesture was disconfirmed negatively by the realization of corporate choreography, leading to dissatisfaction. And in relationship terms, that little betrayal can chip away at trust. As one marketing expert put it, “Nothing ruins trust faster than irrelevant personalization” – or, we might add, insincere personalization.

The Psychology of Authentic Personalization

Beyond marketing metrics and expectations, there’s a psychological element to why fake personalization feels so off-putting.

Self-Determination Theory (SDT), a well-established theory of motivation, helps explain that people have three basic psychological needs: autonomy (feeling in control of one’s own actions), competence (feeling effective and capable), and relatedness (feeling connected to others).

When an experience satisfies these needs, it tends to make us feel good, motivated, and engaged.

When these needs are thwarted, the experience can leave us feeling demotivated or even exploited.

Personalization, at its heart, is supposed to tap into at least one of these needs, especially relatedness. A personal touch from a brand or service provider can make a customer feel seen, appreciated, and connected (hitting that relatedness need) rather than just another face in the crowd.

Think of a local café where the barista genuinely knows you, asks about your day, and remembers you take oat milk in your latte. That experience fulfills relatedness: you feel a social bond. It might even boost your sense of autonomy or competence in the interaction—you’re not fumbling to explain your order; they already get you.

Now compare that to a situation where a brand uses your first name because it was pulled from a database, or a barista reads a scripted line at the drive-thru window. The contrast is clear. The latter can undermine the feeling of relatedness because it’s clearly not personal. It might even dent your sense of autonomy if you feel like you’re being manipulated by a marketing tactic.

In the Starbucks cup message case, the initial effect of a heartfelt note could have been to make a customer feel a little spark of human connection—fulfilling the need for relatedness, which in SDT is a key driver of intrinsic positive feelings and loyalty.

However, once the illusion was broken and it became obvious that the notes were corporate-mandated, those same customers felt no genuine connection at all (one even joked the barista “did not genuinely want me to have a good day”). The gesture was interpreted as a marketing ploy, not a human moment. In SDT terms, the ‘relatedness' need wasn’t satisfied at all. In fact, customers may have felt a bit cynically objectified.

There’s also the perspective of the employees to consider, through an SDT lens. Baristas complained that being forced to write happy messages on cups took away their sense of autonomy—it was no longer their choice to engage warmly; it was an imposed requirement. Workers often value a degree of autonomy and authentic interaction in service roles; being obliged to deliver a scripted experience can feel controlling.

Hochschild’s foundational work on emotional labor distinguishes between “surface acting” (displaying required emotions without actually feeling them) and “deep acting” (attempting to genuinely feel the required emotions). Research on emotional labor shows that employees can experience stress or burnout when required to display emotions or gestures that aren’t genuinely felt, especially if they have no choice in the matter.

In fact, In SDT’s view, the company’s external control over how baristas interact (what they must write on cups) could diminish their intrinsic motivation to provide good service.

They’re no longer friendly because they want to, but because they must. This can lead to resentment or reduced enthusiasm, which ironically might result in poorer customer experience. It’s hard to create a genuine connection when one party—the employee—feels their autonomy and authenticity are constrained.

AI: The Double-Edged Sword of Personalization

It’s difficult to think about fake personalization without also thinking of AI and Gen-AI.

In the digital world, personalization has grown far beyond friendly baristas and handwritten notes. Artificial intelligence now powers personalization for billions of customer interactions, from e-commerce recommendations to streaming media suggestions.

The potential benefits of AI-driven personalization are clear. Companies like Netflix, Amazon, and yes, Starbucks, rely on AI algorithms to analyze customer data and tailor content or offers to individual tastes at an impossible scale for humans to achieve manually. AI-driven personalization is often hailed as a win-win: customers get more relevant, useful suggestions, and businesses see higher engagement and conversion rates.

A recent study on AI-generated personalization underscores the tension between the value of personalization and fears related to privacy. Kapoor and Kumar found that Generative AI-based personalized video ads increased engagement rates by 6-9 percentage points over generic video ads and static personalized image ads.

However, the study also highlights the importance of balancing personalization with user trust—while AI can tailor content at an unprecedented scale, it risks crossing the line into intrusiveness if customers feel their data is being misused. Their findings reinforce that while personalization can enhance engagement, its effectiveness depends on whether customers feel they are still in control of their data.

There are several key risks of using AI to personalize customer experience and service:

Privacy Concerns and the “Creepiness” Factor: The more personal and predictive services become, the more data they require—and that raises privacy flags. Customers are increasingly aware that personalization often means they are being tracked. Every website that magically “knows” what you want is doing so by collecting information about you.

This leads to what researchers call a privacy calculus, where users weigh the value they get from personalization against the personal data they give up. If the scales tip such that the personalization feels invasive or not worth it, customers may balk.

Consumers often describe overly accurate suggestions as “creepy,” especially if they cross personal or sensitive lines. In marketing, over-personalization or contextually odd personalization (like a baby product ad when you just suffered a miscarriage, due to an algorithm’s error) can do real damage to brand sentiment.

Misjudgments by AI can feel like gross invasions of privacy or simply insensitive. If customers feel their data is misused or their privacy is disrespected, trust can plummet.

Loss of Human Touch and Authenticity: While AI can mimic personalization, it can’t replicate genuine human empathy or understanding (at least not yet). There’s a risk that companies lean too heavily on automated personalization and neglect the human element that creates true connection. If every interaction becomes algorithmically driven, customers might get what they think they want, but miss the chance for serendipitous, emotionally rich experiences.

In Starbucks terms, the app might know your purchase history, but it won’t ask how your day is going. Strikingly, Starbucks’ cup campaign was an attempt to re-humanize an experience that had perhaps become too transactional (with mobile orders and drive-thrus). The irony is they attempted to institutionalize the human touch, which backfired.

The lesson for AI-driven efforts is that they should augment, not replace, authentic human connection. Companies like Netflix succeed in part because their personalization is limited to content suggestions—the “interaction” is still you browsing. But if Netflix started auto-generating personal messages or social interactions, users might find it odd. It’s crucial to balance efficiency with empathy.

Mistrust and Errors Undermining Relationships: AI isn’t perfect. Algorithms can make bizarre or wrong recommendations that erode customer confidence in a brand. You might question how well a company knows you if their “personalized” suggestion is way off the mark or tone-deaf. Moreover, heavy reliance on data can backfire if the data is incomplete or misinterpreted, or if the algorithm makes a mistake or hallucinates.

For instance, addressing a customer by the wrong name or showing an ad for a product they just bought (and therefore no longer need) can make the brand seem incompetent. Consumers are quick to judge these misfires. A PwC report on personalization and trust underscores that people want to feel understood, not sold to. When a touchpoint proves the company doesn’t understand (despite all the data), it’s worse than if no attempt was made.

In a sense, every personalized interaction is a small relationship test: get it right and the bond strengthens; get it wrong and it weakens. AI offers more opportunities to get it right at scale, but also more chances to mess up if left unmanaged.

Conclusion

The drive to make customers feel valued is admirable, but personalization is only effective when perceived as genuine. Recent research across marketing, psychology, and organizational behavior confirms that customers seek meaningful engagement and authentic relationships with brands. While AI and data-driven personalization can enhance experiences, they must be balanced with human empathy and authentic connection.

Whether through AI-powered recommendations or human-written notes, authenticity must be at the core of every customer touchpoint and personalization should always serve the customer’s interests first, creating moments of genuine connection rather than merely checking boxes in a marketing strategy.

For Starbucks, if they spent less time scripting customer interactions and more time improving their coffee, then maybe… just maybe, people wouldn’t need an uplifting note to get through a cup.

But I have no such expectations to be disconfirmed.