Moving Tribes - the blog

Learning from coffee

You can learn a lot from coffee. Or at least from the business of selling it. I was reminded of this during a recent fantastic week consulting to a business in Seattle. When not working, I ended up spending some quality time hanging out in various branches of a global Seattle-based coffee empire that needs no introduction from me, and whilst I was there they taught me a lesson which I’d like to share with you.

Before I get to that, the US experience was not my first bit of coffee-shop based education. Many of the most powerful lessons in sales and marketing are those you can learn if you just look at what’s happening around you, and one of those happened for me a couple of years ago in a service station on the M25.

Picture the scene - a big queue of people waiting to get their foamy caffeine injection in order to make the next half an hour of crawling along the motorway a little bit more bearable. At the front of the queue is a sales assistant taking orders. Each bedraggled business traveler in turn gets to the front of the queue and says “latte, please”. The assistant’s response? “Small, medium or large?” Interesting to note that every single person, without exception, responded with “medium, please”.

I’m about halfway along the queue when the sales assistant is relieved by a colleague. Same thing - “Latte, please”. However, the new salesperson chooses a different, more directive response - “Large?”. Sure enough, every single person (including your intrepid reporter) says yes. And I re-learned a vital lesson for any marketer. If we frame the choices we offer customers carefully, and are brave about asking for the up-sell, we can add huge value to our businesses. If you want to make your eyes pop, spend a bit of time calculating how much extra profit that coffee business would make if every medium coffee was sold as a large, earning an extra 50p or so for a few more ccs of hot liquid. All that, just by changing the assistant's language a tiny fraction.

So back to Seattle. My lesson this time was a different one. Firstly a confession - I have very ordinary taste in coffee. The first time I had to queue behind someone asking for a “double shot half-caff hazelnut mocha with soy milk” I was a bit embarrassed to follow up with “latte, please” but I got used to it in the end.

So ubiquitous is this coffee chain that there was actually one underneath the hotel I was staying in, and so my morning routine was to eschew the expensive hotel breakfast and go downstairs for a coffee and a bun. The first morning was a nice experience - chatty staff who noticed and commented on my accent, and a nice coffee and bun.

The lesson came on morning two, however, when as I came downstairs they started making my coffee before I’d even come in through the door, and picked out my bun for me. It was reinforced on the third day when again my coffee was made for me but I was asked if I wanted the usual bun or to try a different one.

Naturally I put this personal service down to my own sheer charisma and magnetism, but I’m realistic enough and curious enough that I started listening to what was going on, and in the end I noticed an extraordinary thing. Not only in that branch but in every other one I visited I overheard customers being greeted like old friends, asked if they wanted their usual and generally treated like they were just as much a part of the business as the staff themselves. I even heard one customer, who had obviously been away for a while, issue a friendly challenge to see if the staff remembered his unbelievably complicated usual drink, which they did.

The adage that people in the US are more comfortable with delivering a great customer service experience than people in the UK is an old one. The real lesson from my coffee sessions, I think, is a different one. All of these branches, of one of the biggest brands in the world, succeeded in making themselves feel like small local businesses and in making their customers feel like valued regulars - the real “Cheers” experience. For a big business, that’s an incredibly neat trick, and one which even that company has not succeeded in replicating in the UK as far as I can see. A thought provoking challenge for all of us - how close are our big brands to genuinely delivering the local experience that shows individual customers how valued they are? What kind of culture do you have to create in your business to get that to happen? What could we do to transform our businesses to get closer to that wonderful, loyalty-inspiring goal? Something to ponder over your next coffee.

The language of brand

What language do your customers speak? This being the big wide world of the internet, the literal answer to that could be any one of dozens, but that’s not what I mean. The real answer is that they speak their own language, and if that’s different than the one you use when you speak to them, you might be in trouble.

Your customers will have their own way of describing your products, their own way of describing how to use them and their own way of recommending them to each other. As I discussed in NPS and  you, getting an active recommendation from our customers is amongst the most powerful results our marketing can achieve. Understanding in detail how our customers come to recommend our brand requires us first of all to listen to their language.

One of the lessons you learn when you really listen to your customers is about the names they give to bits of your product or service. Does a pay-as-you-go mobile customer actually refer to a “top-up” when they add money to their account, or do they use a different word? Does your frequent flyer customer actually refer to your frequent flyer programme by the name you slaved over, or do they refer to it as “air miles” – even more irritating when it’s someone else’s brand?! Do they talk about adding an additional service from you as “upgrading” or just as buying something else?

So the lesson is that we need to talk to our customers about our brand and products in the language that they use if we are to make ourselves easy to understand. If we want to change the language that customers use, that’s a worthwhile objective but it needs a marketing campaign in its own right and will take time to deliver. There is no use just assuming that if we dogmatically refer to our “loyalty programme benefits” that our customers will stop talking about our “discount coupons”.

The difference between the language our customers use and our internal terminology becomes a particular problem when we accidentally use that terminology in our external communications.  I’ve actually rung a subscription business with a view to closing my account to be put through to someone who announced “hello, this is x from the Customer Turnaround team”! Not the best way to open a conversation which was, for that brand, a critical one in their relationship with me as a customer.

Do you really know how your customers describe your brand and your products when they talk to each other? If not, how are you going to find out? Are you ready to drop your own terminology and forget your own in-depth knowledge of your industry (all those lovely acronyms!) and really listen to your customers?

Once we start listening to our customers, we’ll quickly realise that they are not only telling us what they think of us and our products. There are also clues in their language about which marketing messages they will respond to most. A good understanding of how language, psychology and marketing fit together is a recipe for very effective marketing – more on that next time.