Marketing
A real-time marketing project
Hello comrades. Today was the first day of Mini MBA. While I attend the course, I will share my learning with the fellow bootstrappers. Please send me your questions about your business and marketing. I will find out the answers.
I saw a gap
When I rebooted Shack Coffee Co, I had seen a gap in Indian specialty coffee. The zeal to imitate American brands, has ignored the customers. Snobbery matters more than the taste. What customers want, doesn’t matter.
Indian customers
Indian palette is different from American one. Indian weather is different from American one. Flavours dominating Indian foods are unique. India gave sugar to the world. But, specialty coffee despises adding sugar to brewed coffees. Indian food pairing with coffee is a big gap ( Try Ella Ada with French Press or Pour Over).
I see endless possibilities around specialty coffee with the coffee lovers in the focus, instead of the endless jargon about coffee in the focus.
Specialty coffee is a simple way of grading green coffee. It aims to identify great coffees. Great ingredients are necessary for delicious end products, but they do not automatically become great end products. Jargons and PR won’t turn the beans into tasty coffee. Craft does.
Local vs big businesses
I am late to the party. Indian specialty coffee has leading brands such as Blue Tokai Coffee, Third Wave Café and Sleepy Owl. Venture capital firms have invested millions of rupees. They have rented premium spaces in Delhi, Bengaluru, and Mumbai. They do not shy away from advertisement blitzkrieg.
I am bootstrapping. I will invest my savings. I value customers and the community more than the coffee jargons. What will help me stand out?
Can marketing help
I often see bootstrappers struggling. Some blame e-commerce. Few blame governments. Digital ads and social media have not helped as much they had promised. Who is responsible for the struggle? The reason is within: lack of sales analysis, ignoring the customer research and hiring the wrong people to promote the businesses.
Marketing professor Mark Ritson suggested that even small businesses can succeed like big businesses. Marketer Samuel Brealey helps small businesses apply the fundamentals of marketing to succeed. In short, marketing can help local and bootstrapped businesses.
Step by step
The first module is Market Orientation. It talks about how businesses focus on wrong things such as cost, time, fear, assumptions, and arrogance. Instead, they should only focus on wants and behaviours of their current and prospective customers. I will do the same for Shack Coffee Co.:
Who are the customers?
What do they want?
Why do they want?
How do they behave with regard to specialty coffee/ coffee?