Organization Espresso

I am a big time coffee enthusiast, also having been professionally involved in the coffee business with one of the largest coffee chains in the world, the line of coffee retail is something which I can relate to and have experiences to share from.

Recently the pioneer of the Coffee Concepts in India, The Café Coffee Day chain of stores is receiving a lot of fire on social media on one of their policy on what music should be played in the café. People of a linguistic segment are roping that the café should play the music in their languages in the café operating in their linguistic areas. This issue being particularly sensitive one given the kind of politicizing happens within the country over the language. Before I share my views upon the issue, I would like to mention some of my close encounters regarding this issue from the other side.

I am a regular customer at the café I frequent, and am a steady source of the revenue for the folks there. My bonds with my café have always been strong, right from the store manager & the stewards love me for I understand the business and the ordeal they have to go during a day at work.

There are two instances, during 2006-07 Barista had a tie up with the World Space radio and had mandated that only the songs from a particular station in World Space can be played in their stores. In reality the station was really bad and since it was a corporate mandate they had to play the songs, so we had to ask them to reduce the volume to as low as possible.

Another instance, A premium coffee chain (would not like to name it, as I don’t want the staff to get into the trouble) outlet in Pune, used to oblige the regular customers by playing their songs towards the end of the day based on whatever music we had. I actually used to carry my CDs and Ipod to connect to the café music while I had coffee. One day similarly another customer came in and he was not happy about the music being played in the café and wanted a change. The café guys immediately changed the music.

So coming back to the problem being faced by the CCD folks, we need to get back to why there is music in the café stores and the kind of music should be played is actually a marketing decision on demographics & target audience.



Image Source: Google Images

Dealing into the question what purposes does the music serves in a café, I would list the following-

1- Creating a lively & positive ambience in the store
2- Creating ample amount of noise so that the conversations remain private
3- When the footfalls are low the café should not appear dead and eerie

Now coming to the second part of the question, what kind of demographics & target audience these café cater to-

1- Majority of Café business comes from the Young Urban Professionals group. Who often use
2- Another hot segment adding footfalls is the Student groups who need a place to hang-out
3- The third segment being the regional demographic in and around the store area.

Now if we look the above first 2 categories are migratory in nature, change cities, jobs and often constitute of a crowd that in common language is often addressed as the Cosmo crowd. Profiling of these audiences on a regional & linguistic basis would be a bad strategy because they are always in flux and the structure and constituents continuously keep on changing.

So what a coffee store can aim at is creating a standard profiling based on what might be the most common and inclusive tastes of the audience from food to the music and try and create a uniform ambience across the stores. Once a customer gets habitual with the store and the brand, the best strategy for a chain like CCD would be to leverage the customer base & loyalty by providing a uniform experience to the customer across stores. Which is why what CCD is doing right now is correct.

Now to look at the effects of the region based profiling; which is being demanded of the CCD folks by their very own customer. Assume a scenario, similar to my second example above, two customers in the store insisting the music to be of their type. Now the ground level operational staff would be in a soup, even if the sharpest of guys are operating on the ground level, they just might end up offending one of the customers and might lose them. It is a strategic decision not to entertain or cater to a particular customer set but then the operational staff cannot be trusted to make those choices.

Also looking at an additional aspect of the problem this might also be something similar to the example which I mentioned above. The issue might be of a dislike of the music of a particular kind and for some reasons is appearing as a political and a linguistic side of it. This can be a great opportunity for the CCD folks to look back at their market research and open up a survey amongst their target audience visiting their café and the others to identify if there is a serious gap in the kind of music they are playing and the kind of music is being expected by the customers. And then enforce the standardized music all across the stores. In case the issue turns more political, then a valid option for them might be to ditch all the languages and go for universal constants like Music or English to maintain and address their needs.

by Prats | on Monday, July 12th, 2010 at 10:31 am | Current Affairs and Issues . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.