Monday, October 31, 2011

Here for the Coffee, or for the "something else"?



No much intro .. intro will come later. For now, I'd like to share with you the following research questions and results.

Research Objectives
The research aimed to answer the following questions:
  1. What are customers’ drivers to visit a coffee shop?
  2. How much is the coffee shop’s offering in synch with those drivers?
  3. What are the other areas the coffee shop should look into to grow the target and redefine a new focus?
Results

Following is a brief of the Results of the research
  • People come to coffee shops for many reasons; amongst which is not to just drink coffee.
  • People do create their own categorization and classification of coffee shops and on "what coffee shop fits for what purpose."
  • Customers reported some cases where coffee shops are doing more than just offering coffee like the cases of meeting rooms and match-watching setup.
  • Being not coming for coffee, all customers have substitutes for coffee shops that also offer some extra value.
  • All customers agree that they wouldn’t drink coffee if they don’t have to.
  • Coffee shops are designed to make customers consume coffee. The decoration in researched coffee shops included nothing but texts on coffee, pictures of coffee, they were all shades of brown and yellow, all equipments in place and staff are there to sell coffee.
  • Customers can’t understand what else could coffee shops offer them to make their value creation better, but when certain concepts are offered they like them.
  • There’s low involvement in the value creation process, this resulted in all happy moments and pain points having nothing to do with the service being delivered but more with the activity (he’s happy when his friends arrived, he’s upset when subject of study got harder).
  • Some customer’s were affected by the perception of value creation of other stakeholders (one customer goes to coffee shops with his wife because for her “happy families go to coffee shops”)
  • Service providers don’t keep consistent value proposition and delivery. Some branches of the same brand were smaller, more confined, noisier than others. Some come in multistory, independent buildings while some would be small stores. In return, customers create their own virtual value proposition and perception of each individual branch and act accordingly.
I would like to ask if this makes anything spark in your mind. Is it the same way in your community? Is there a service you know suffers from similar problems or root causes? what's it we're missing and what could be done?



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