The antics of coffee marketers

Date Posted:1 February 2016 

Are coffee marketers the used car salespeople of our generation ?

I've sneaked in the occasional rant before about the saturated state of our domestic coffee industry and perhaps even been a tad guilty of drawing similarities of the current era to the gold rush period in the 1850's..

The market show no signs of maturing, consolidating, segmenting, regulating or reforming......so it's become a rather confusing array of commercial barrage to our senses.

We are subjected to unrelenting messages of buy, Buy, BUY in order to keep volumes at levels that make an operation viable.

Every company seems to be working every angle whether it's core or not to their business - it's beginning to smell of desperation.

In the break between Xmas and New Year I thought about the year ahead with a level of excitement - resolutions always present the opportunity to change the game or do things differently.

The contest is now hot with competition snapping everywhere. Perhaps the most significant impact on the market has been the rise of small regional players and the associated pull they can attract in their local areas.

I started to think about what the future of the coffee universe might look like.

• Can single serve portion control take over the market leading position as consumers rank speed and convenience above pleasure and enjoyment,
• Do we expect logistics services to eventually fulfil the promise to enable a game changer on bricks and mortar retailers,
• Are there a new undiscovered pieces of coffee innovation ripe for commercialisation. Just about all the ground has been tread upon by many elephants already.

I often look around at what everyone else is doing - sometimes it's a bit of mindless late night iPad time before the wave of tiredness hits.

Now, I have a pretty robust sense of humour but upon reading the information contained in almost every website I visited, I was left rather dismayed at how lazy some companies had become, or I should say their copywriters are just blatantly pasting similar phrases pinched from other sites - even our own content has been nicked many times over - rather hard not to get upset at all the imitators.

It was nothing more than a homogenous blend of statements that were all saying, or I should say promising, basically the same thing.

Where was the differentiation, the unique value proposition and the genuine attempt to help customers.

Was any part of what I read true and how can I trust what was stated.

These were difficult questions to answer and it forced me think deeply about our own customer offer.

Some were attempting to seduce you into placing an order, roast and pack your order and send it fast the same day.

Well, that sort of promise of being able to do all that during business hours actually stretches the truth more than a little unless of course they were only processing a couple of small orders each day on roasters so small they are unlikely to sustain any coffee business for very long indeed.

In other words, it was in all likelihood just a trick to capture business.

All sort of incentives were thrown at customers from the sellers of imported coffees - free freight, special volume discounts, extra packs an even an eye-watering 2 for 1 deal.

These sorts of marketing actions are largely in response to a highly competitive and difficult market, or the result of a company seeking to move rapidly deteriorating or distressed inventory knowing all too well they appeal to bargain hunters.

There is a well spoken marketing phrase that rings so very true in the coffee world - sell the sizzle, not the sausage.

At the pointy end of the premium food market around the world - those places where you pay thousands of dollars for fine dining experiences, the emphasis is more about the story than the food - rare and exotic ingredients used to create something amazing - think Heston Blumenthal.

We see similar themes in the premium coffee segment here in Australia - elaborate stories about how coffee roasters travel to origin, stand with the farmers picking cherries and then carefully nurture the raw beans on special shipments before gently roasting those precious coffees to develop something truly unique. The stories are becoming a bit unrealistic.

Whilst there are genuinely passionate people in our industry that share similar beliefs and convictions to ourselves, people with a lot of "skin in the game" and who stand behind their product, I have to admit to an extreme dislike of the practise of putting competitors down in order to elevate your own position as it reeks of desperation and mis-representation.

My view is that standards of coffee bean quality keep improving at rapid rates.

Great coffee is available almost anywhere these days so it's really just a simple matter of providing exceptional value, high levels of transparency and running that extreme freshness element (service) in order to keep building the momentum.

Marketing coffee has become in many respects similar to flogging used cars - do anything and everything to make a sale - which is sort of a shame that market saturation has forced some to resort to these tactics.

In 2016 we plan to change the game a little so that our products and services become more like an experience.

The focus will be on how the customer can extract a better sense of enjoyment from their coffee - whether it's technical tips, helpful advice on choosing coffees or a broader range of beverage offerings beyond coffee, one thing is certain..........it's going to be about you, the customer.