Posts Tagged ‘marketing’

Gwilym’s disloyalty card

Thursday, December 17th, 2009

Let me start by saying that this has to be one of the best ideas I’ve seen in ages.  I’m very pleased and very excited by this.

Gwilym Davies – you know, the current World Barista Champion – has come up with a rather splendid card: the disloyalty card.

The idea is simple:  If you go and drink coffee at 8 interesting, quality focused cafes around (mostly) East London then he will say thank you by making you a coffee for free.

(click to embiggen)

I just think this is brilliant.  There is no catch, it isn’t some cunning ruse to sell more coffee.  It might work if one roaster supplied all the places on the card – but there is a complete mix from Burgil to Union, from Square Mile to Nude’s in house espresso.  Gwilym just wants people to go and try coffee in different places.

This man is a great ambassador for coffee.

So swing by Prufrock Coffee in Present at 140 Shoreditch High Street, grab a card and then have a little tour of some great cafes around Central and East London.  There is one of the best baristas in the world at the end of it, waiting to give you a delicious drink to say thank you.  Superb.

The Fair Trade Finish Line

Sunday, October 18th, 2009

A little while ago my frustration with Cadburys advertising led me to try and sum up my frustrations with Fair Trade in 140 characters. The best I could do was,

Fair Trade – the absolute minimum necessary to get people to stop questioning how you source, or pushing you to do better. Not enough.

The advert that had sparked it off was one I had seen on the underground, and it was the language more than anything that frustrated me: (more…)

Brewed coffee and the UK

Saturday, May 30th, 2009

This is something of a summary of the short talk I gave at the Allegra Strategies UK Coffee Leader Summit a week or so ago.  Please also bear in mind that this talk was directed at the UK market specifically so won’t necessarily hold true for other national coffee cultures.

For me this talk was a moment of crystalisation about how I feel about coffee right now, and what I want to focus a lot of my energy on.  I had initially planned to talk about how quality focused businesses were doing well right now, but in the process of writing the talk that seemed to shift.  I should add a final caveat to this by saying that I do love making and drinking espresso.

My talk was titled “How the coffee industry lost the public’s trust, and how good coffee can win it back again.”

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The wine model doesn’t work

Wednesday, January 7th, 2009

I think everyone in coffee knows deep down this is true. The wine model only works for wine, we can’t transplant it to coffee and expect some immediate understanding and increased sales of quality coffees.

First and foremost – we don’t drink coffee like we drink wine. Broadly speaking we buy wine in two different circumstances: to enjoy ourselves and to enjoy with others. Generally we spend more, buy better, buy more interesting when we are enjoying it with others. We want to know more, want a little story, want something worth discussing. Wine’s great success was making it culturally acceptable/desirable to discuss what you drank at some length. Coffee isn’t quite there yet. We drink coffee in different circumstances – mostly it is a solitary affair, though sometimes shared but rarely the focal point the way a stellar bottle of wine can be. We experience it in different environments, with different goals and different focus on the sensory experience.
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