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Marketing (over) coffee
Posted on March 20th, 2009 View Comments
Here in Prague we’ve got 3 players in the ‘Starbucks style’ coffee shop market (and some pretty decent small ‘classic’ cafes, and a fair few ‘grand cafe’ type places too). Personally I’ll have a coffee anywhere that serves a decent cup, but some of the smaller places are losing out to the chains. It would be a shame to lose some of these places but inevitability is knocking at the door.There are a number of reasons why Starbucks, Costa and Coffee Heaven are always busy and the independent are not.
Reason one: to-go
The big guys will all serve you coffee to go in a big takeaway cup. The smaller cafes don’t even have a serving size equivalent to the Venti or Massimo (extra large!). That just doesn’t fit with the image of a coffee to go that we see on TV – business person drinking from an oversized coffee cup like it’s a baby’s bottle.
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Loyalty Cards – How Many is Too Many?
Posted on March 17th, 2009 View Comments
We all like to be treated well by companies we use frequently and the loyalty card is the simplest tool at a marketer’s disposal to identify your best customers. Used well they’re very effective – they keep a customer using your airline, even when the others are more expensive, they allow you to track customer behaviour and target your marketing efforts more effectively.There’s just one problem – they’re a huge pain to carry around. In this image there are cards for a restaurant, a cinema, a coffee chain, a drugstore, an airline, a hotel chain… It’s all very well for marketers to assume that a customer will only have their airline’s loyalty card in their wallet, but what about all the other companies? Supermarkets, petrol (gas) stations and every other loyalty card scheme are all vying for space in your already over stuffed wallet/purse/pocketbook.
Some supermarkets have figured this out, they give you a different piece of plastic with a number on – a small card to go on your keyring, so of course you can’t leave home without it – that works fine until you end up with 10 of them on your keyring and your bunch of keys won’t fit in a pocket any more.
As Guy Kawasaki says ‘never ask someone to do something you wouldn’t do yourself’. Loyalty marketers need to consider this: would you carry around a wallet full of plastic just for the, at best, 10% benefit the card earns you, if you remember to show it?
Certified Inbound Marketing Professional
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