Wake up and smell the profit. 89Hugo – true story
I was working with a highly successful pub
group and we had created a wonderful
coffee offer for them. The staff were experts
in producing high quality cocktails so understood at a very base
level the concept of creating excellent coffee. They were highly
motivated and within a short time were producing coffee of a
very high standard. The bar was in a busy city centre site with
fabulous views and had a lovely relaxing ambience that could
work equally well at 10.00 a.m. on a Monday morning as it did at
10.00 p.m. on a Saturday night. It was also next door to a coffee
chain and takeaway coffee sales were poor.We simply didn’t seem to be able to fully persuade the
customers that they should be enjoying their speciality coffee in
a bar instead of elsewhere. Takeaway sales needed a jolt. We
came up with an experiment taking a leaf out of the retail book.layout in the big supermarkets and see what you can learn from
them. Very often these large chains will have spent huge fortunes
testing and developing marketing campaigns before they roll them
out to the stores. You can be pretty certain that they work by the
time they’ve reached your area, so look hard and dissect what it is
that they are trying to do and ask yourself if it’s possible to transfer
the idea to your café.