OK, I just can't help myself...........was going to refrain from commenting. :-X It has been well reported previously that coffee is seen by the rest of the world as a commodity product - albeit an essential one. For cafe owners, the selection of coffee provider is not an emotional purchase - it's not like buying a house, car or hooking up with your other-half. It's part "great deal" and part "promise". On a given day, any coffee company can perform well, so you need to take on-board the fact you are just NOT going to create an offer that is remarkably differentiated from the others. Try as you might, close your eyes and think of a world where you believe you are fresher, cheaper, more focused and providing superior value, but the wake-up call is that you are exactly the same and cafes will view you that way. Competing on price is a race to the bottom and only attracts the wrong sort of clients - they are the ones who don't pay bills, deliberately under-order supplies and then scream at a supplier when they have run out of something. Creating a wonderful set of collateral is also of limited use. Most cafe owners are over-worked, tired and rarely have the time to surf the internet or read glossies offering hollow promises. Many are quite skeptical. Just about everything in traditional product marketing will not work.......... Putting aside for a moment the large companies with lazy balance sheets that can afford the $500K in capex to fund the FOL-lock-in solution as a pipeline to protect supply of their budget-driven beans. There are 2 primary pathways - relationships & equipment solution. Relationships are contacts, referrals, etc. Relationships are what makes a saturated me-too commodity market revolve. You basically have to *buy* contacts, and I'm not talking about freebies, I'm talking about reps who have large lists of cafe owners that can enter a cafe and have casual conversations to build awareness and create opportunity. The second pathway is via equipment. It comes as no surprise to discover that most cafe owners think more about the equipment than the beans. It is a way you might be able to differentiate if you have exclusive rights on certain equipment. Example being many Melbourne cafes think they need Brand X espresso machine or they will never produce a decent cup and subsequently what follows is they end up using the Brand X suppliers beans in a high proportion of cases. That's where great marketing works well. Best advice - stop looking on the internet, get off your butt and get out and talk to cafe owners.
