In 2013, Starbucks opened their first coffee shop in Vietnam, hoping to cash in on the population's deep love for coffee. However, despite powerful marketing backed by a global name brand, Starbucks has struggled to overtake the $1 billion Vietnamese coffee market. WHY?

First, to understand why Starbucks failed, we need to understand the Vietnamese people's profound love affair with coffee that seeps far deeper than a corporate giant's marketing department can estimate.

Walk down a Vietnamese street at any hour during the day, even at 2:00am, and you can expect to see the local coffee shops patronized with groups of friends, poets, writers, musicians...who probably have been slowly sipping on their coffee for hours....enjoying each other's company and sharing ideas.

They're not in a hurry to gulp 'n go anywhere, like how Americans treat their coffee as simply a mean to a quick caffeine fix. In Vietnam, coffee is thoroughly intertwined into the culture. Do you know how many of our songs, poems, and books romanticize the imagery of the protagonist melancholically sipping their coffee while reminiscing their tragedy? More than I can count.

There is a reason why the classic Vietnamese coffee brewing method, which uses an aluminum filter called "phin," takes 20 minutes from start to finish. Hot water leisurely soaks into the tightly packed coffee ground then drip through sand-sized holes at a snail's pace....and that's because while you're waiting for the coffee, you're supposed to have a chat with your friends, or read a book, or write a song. The end result is an intensely aromatic cup of coffee that will be worth the wait. To Vietnamese, coffee is meant for LINGERING.

And the marketing executives at Starbucks just simply did not understand this part of our culture. And that is why Starbucks overestimated their ability to bulldoze over the local mom and pop coffee shops with their overpriced and over-roasted, watered down coffee.