Brand Marketing strategy is a comprehensive plan that includes any business’s decision and action to acquire the target customer adoption by understanding and fulfilling their needs and wants. This is the brand’s roadmap to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage by connecting the marketing mix with limited resources to optimize business opportunities (Ferrell & Hartline, 2014, 2011).
An ideal marketing strategy facilitates the current market situation and more prolonged the lifespans of the brand. The brand’s essence should derive the direction of the marketing strategy as the following process: Segmenting, Targeting & Positioning.
The following study will elaborate on how Blue Bottle Coffee implants the marketing strategy to build up their “Coffee Community” by motivating customers’ acquired needs and enlarging their product/service uniqueness from their competitor.
Targeting segment of coffee market & products positioning
Mr James Freeman, the founder of Blue Bottle Coffee, is inspired to start his coffee business because he was fed up with the taste of over-roasted coffee beans from the big chain coffee store (like Starbucks), which is the mainstream of the coffee market in the 2000s. Refer to the Hierarchy of needs in Figure 1 (Maslow, 1987), Coffee consumption is mainly serving for social (a collaboration of workmate /friendship), and Ego (symbol of the middle class) needs within that moment (Barry, 2019). The desire for freshness and deliciousness cups guide Freeman’s vision to the potential of the speciality coffee market. Base on the brand’s belief, Blue Bottle Coffee aims to arouse the customer’s need to “Self-Actualization” level where refer to individual desire on the need very specifically (fulfil the desire on the speciality coffee), they are seeking for personal growth and peak experience (Maslow, 1987). In terms of demographics and geographics, people within this section live in well-developed areas where average income and education levels are high (Barry, 2019). The cluster with the driving force of desiring the authentic taste of the freshest coffee is the core target segment of Blue Bottle Coffee.
Open the door of the Specialty coffee market- Customise delivery service
The coffee market was already oversaturated, and the perfectionism on coffee taste was relatively new when the business began in the 2000s. Freeman offers a sample to coffee lovers for introduction the freshest coffee taste to arouse their cognition of the single-origin coffee. Unlike the general “Crab and Go coffee” concept, Blue Bottle Coffee provides a precious weekly delivery service of freshest coffee with customer personal taste after having direct conversations with them. The fresh cup is selling by coffee cart at the farmer market (Inc, 2021). Through this direct communication and satisfying coffee taste experience from customers. The word of mouth spread over the Bay area of San Francisco. Blue Bottle successfully introduces its artisanal coffee into the market and acquires customers to enjoy their high-end coffee.
Why Blue Bottle Coffee? — Cultivated premium coffee culture by content marketing & SEO strategy
Riding the 3rd wave of the coffee movement, many different artisanal & speciality coffee brands have mushroomed. As the major player of this coffee movement, how does Blue Bottle Coffee tie its brand together with “high-end speciality coffee” and the customer?
Facing the competitive market, promoting the coffee culture was Blue Bottle Coffee’s marketing strategy to expand the customer segment and maintain their passion for pursuing superlative quality with the brand. Blue Bottle Coffee implants “content marketing”[1], which is created and shared online materials (such as videos, blogs and posts on social media & their website) to stimulate the interest in its products. By creating and sharing about coffee storing and brewing guides, the background story of each coffee bean, daily tasting process on the coffee quality control of the brands, Blue Bottle coffee aims to hoick up the human desirability to try their artisanal coffee (Walden, 2014). Once the customer acknowledges and addiction, they will advocate the culture to others. Because of this valuable content promotion, Blue Bottle Coffee builds up the speciality coffee industry’s creditability.
Along with aforesaid “content marketing”, Blue Bottle Coffee spent much investment on Search Engine Optimization that helps the brand become the first feature when people search by common keywords about handcrafted coffee (see Fig 3). This leading more visitors to their website and keep Blue Bottle Coffee at a high ranking in the search engine platform.
Figure 4 show the organic traffic data result under SEO strategy. The traffic data shows Blue Bottle Coffee’s content is helpful information for people when they are searching about the brewing guide of handcrafted coffee. This is not only appreciated by current customers but also acting as an acquisition method (e.g. search about” how to make pour-over cup “). More acquisition means a higher chance of adoption. This reflects that the content potentially pulls the new customer to the “Action” stage of the marketing funnel. Continue to educate through the brand’s content to retain existing customers and turn them into loyal brand members.
Recall customer motivation — email marketing
The education content & SEO strategy is just the starting point of the customer lifecycle. Blue Bottle Coffee develop a mature email system (email marketing)[2] to recall and motivate customers consumption. A greeting email with a free bag offer will be sent to new subscribers of Blue Bottle coffee. Fee tasting is absolutely an excellent way to stimulate consumption. The welcome kit will send with the first purchase order. For existing customers/subscribers, Blue Bottle Coffee issues a regular email newsletter updating the content of coffee beans stories, new coffee brewing guide, coffee events, and coffee recommendation to showcase their service and products. An abandoned cart and transactional email automatically to related customers. This email program is a direct and subtle approach to stimulate the interest of new customers and encourage the purchase of current and churn customers.
Brand awareness — Simple & Unique brand association — “APPLE of coffee industry”
The content and email strategies drive sales while establishing brand awareness by seeding the trustable speciality coffee icon into customers’ minds. Customers will recall Blue Bottle Coffee when they are looking for speciality coffee. Besides, the unique and simple brand association is essential to increasing the customer’s ability to recognize Blue Bottle Coffee’s differentiation in the market.
Keep everything simple is always the principle of Blue Bottle Coffee. From teaching people by step-by-step brew guide to the products’ package, website, and café design. Blue Bottle Coffee delivers its brand identity directly. Their logo is already a straightforward design to present the brand name “BLUE BOTTLE”. The website, social media platforms and product packages maintain a consistent colour tone (blue, white, grey, light brown). Description/words are short & clear on social media platforms. For example, three simple words to conclude its core value, “Hospitality, Deliciousness, Sustainability”. The minimal aesthetic concept is like APPLE, especially on the unique spatial aesthetics of Café design. Because of the similar brand association, Blue Bottle Coffee got the reputation of “APPLE in the coffee industry” (Anon., 2021). This led to Blue Bottle Coffee reported by some professional magazines or websites quite often, such as the architect & design field. They caught up the eyeballs of professionals, like architects, designers, and artists, who became the brand’s pilgrim.
Competitive Point of Parity — Physical customer experience
While the most prominent competitors, Starbucks Reserve (Anon., 2021), expand its market share in speciality coffee by offer various gimmick beverages (like coffee cocktails & dessert) and a funny coffee outlet to the young adult cluster, Blue Bottle Coffee focuses on offering rarely type coffee, so their drinking menu is relatively simple. There is no music, Wi-Fi, and no computer policy at touchpoint cafe to encourage genuine face-to-face interaction between customers and baristas, especially about the coffee-making process. Blue Bottle Coffee create a chic and inviting ambience for customers to enjoy a great cup of coffee. All these strategies are aligned with the brand association, “simple & unique”.
Their café location will only select where they can achieve the brand commitment “sell the coffee which is roasted less than 48 hrs”. Knowing the weakness of their network compare with Starbucks Reserve, Blue Bottle Coffee aim to provide the “best” coffee experience instead of the “largest” one. Keep “improving” their coffee quality instead of “maintaining” the quality is their strategy to sustain the brand equity (Oremus, 2014). Hence, regular coffee event and physical brewing class is the channel to collect the customer insight and enhance the loyalty of their coffee community.
New product and sale channel
With the change of market situation and challenges from other brands, Blue Bottle Coffee develops new categories and business models in different product and service levels to cater to customers’ needs by leveraging the brand equity with their new idea “enjoy coffee at any time of the day”. For instance, ready to drink products and instant coffee. Recently, they introduce a Vending machine to sell coffee beans, instant coffee, coffee mug and canned coffee in Japan as the testing point (Nakatsugawa, 2020). This is the pioneer sales channel in the speciality coffee market. This business model lets customers enjoy speciality coffee more conveniently at home, especially when all touchpoint café close during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Critical Reflection
Blue Bottle Coffee is aware of its brand weakness in the market network, which echoes the previous study on the improvement plan of the brand. Instead of focusing on the weakness in geographics, Blue Bottle Coffee take another vision on human’s consuming behaviour, “drinking time”, to expand the customer segment. Hence, the marketing strategy “enjoy coffee at any time of the day” was introduced by a new product category and sales channel. Compare with the suggestion in the previous study about the “coffee cart” campaign and 2 in 1 coffee equipment, the “speciality coffee vending machine” is more cost-saving and immediately plan to catch up with the change of market situation and achieve the goal of “convivence to customers”.
Hence, select another entry point to solve the problem and analyse any factor (like the customer mind influenced by society) that might affect the strategy should be part of consideration on the design process.
NOTES
[1] Content marketing is a technique to create and distribute valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and acquire the target audience’s action (Steimle, 2014).
[2] Email marketing is a popular and effective tool to make customers aware of products/services of the brand by using mail to promote the latest items or offers in an automation effort (Anon., 2021).
References
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Images & Illustrations
Figure 1 Target Cluster position at Hierarchy of Needs by Dr Abraham Maslow (Maslon,1987)
Figure 2 Share Brew guide in social media (Phillips, n.d.)
Figure 3 Blue Bottle Coffee brewing guide is the featured snippet on Google (source, Jilt.com)
Figure 4 Organic keyword traffic data (source jilt.com)
Figure 5 Mature email system of Blue Bottle coffee ( (Inc, 2021)(mailcharts.com)
Figure 6 Consistent design on Logo, package, social media & Cafe design (Inc, 2021)
Figure 7 Blue Bottle Cafe reported by professional magazine (Source, B magazine; Frame magazine; Wallpaper magazine)
Figure 8 Regular coffee event & brewing class for loyalty member (Inc, 2021)