Monday, September 15, 2008

Experience Makes a Brand

Café Coffee Day or CCD as it is popularly know stands today, with 595 cafés across 100 cities in India, It also has three outlets in Vienna, and two in Karachi,
It is the largest player in the coffee market and is followed by Barista, which has about 200 cafés. Java Green (around 75 cafés) and Mocha (around 25 cafés).
According to the venture capital firm Sequoia Capital: "The coffee shops have enough potential to open a café every 200 yards in the country, within five minutes' walking distance of one another.", now keep this in mind before you read further.

In this intense competitive market , what do we think would make a brand different from the another, the taste , the offering or the experience ? Even before you answer this question ask yourself whether you go to a coffee shop to have a coffee or to enjoy a coffee.

When a customer goes to an outlet he not only factors the offering in the menu but is equally looking forwards towards the ambience, the service, the hospitality and may be the not so significant aspects like the music played.

What makes me write this, well very recently we found all these elements missing during our outing to a CCD outlet. The Cold coffee was served hot , there were no glasses to serve water , the order were messed up and above all even the music which was played was bad.

The case in the point is not to complaint about the outlet but to highlight two important issues :

1) Cafe Coffee Day to have 900 outlets by year end , now if they only want to grow and do not focus on customer experience then they are leading to nowhere. Only growing their stores would not result in any benefits , patronage of its brand will.
2) At this pace of growth the company needs to ensure that customer ensure the same experience all over the country in the similar manner, may be I am talking about copying the Mc Donald experience model

To conclude I will only say that brand is what the customer experience and associate with. If a brand especially of the likes of CCD, is not able to strike a chord with the customer then, certainly its growth is not a real growth but its slow yet steady movement towards the path of oblivion.

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