Coffee Source Marketing: eCommerce & Retail

We began by turning towards the core factors that distinguished Coffee Source from its peers in the highly-competitive local coffee market. In a heavily-saturated sector, their core differentiation lies in the depth of their expertise and in the specificity of their product offerings. Unlike many chain stores, Coffee Source tailors each cup to their customer’s own unique preferences and flavor palate.

They accomplish this with vendor relationships that secure a wide variety of high-quality beans and coffee blends, a highly-knowledgeable staff, and their own in-house coffee roasting capabilities.

Large international chains are generally unable or unwilling to utilize high-quality beans and precision roasting for their entire sourcing operations, and there are multiple reasons for this. Chiefly, there are significantly lower yields on high-quality beans, thereby increasing costs, and desires for product uniformity across multiple markets limits their roasting options.

As their audience and supply chains scale significantly, so too does the complexity of providing “the perfect cup of joe.” In general, coffee franchises like Starbucks famously choose to intentionally over-roast their beans to guarantee uniformity and to avoid complex flavors that may be undesirable to a marginal, but not insignificant, segment of their customer-base.

Like a broadcast television network sitcom, their goal is to be as “inoffensive” as possible, rather than to be the most “like-able” or “strongly desirable”  option. It is a “safe” choice, not a “bold” one.

By avoiding anything mildly disagreeable to some, large chains seek to eliminate any potentially objectionable component. In other words, to avoid repelling the few, they rob desirable elements from the many; in the process, they run the risk of appealing to no one.

We believe in bold brands(internal link) here, its one of our core values, so this initial value proposition resonated well.