September 30th, 2007
A Starbucks in the College Library?
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As an MBA student at IIMB, I spent an absolutely obscene number of nights in the institute library. The canteen closed at midnight and an insomniacs like me could only get my nocturnal caffeine kicks from a canister of terrible South Indian coffee that the canteen folks very considerately left behind. Even during daytime, the best coffee you could get in campus was from a vending machine, and you know how bland vending machine coffee can be. That changed, by the way, in my second year, when I spent most of my nights in the girls hostel, rarely reading, and had my coffee brewed in an electric kettle.
You can probably imagine the mixed emotions I felt when I went back to campus a couple of years back and found the students hanging out at a brand new Cafe Coffee Day outlet inside the campus. The campus had found a new favorite public space.
That’s what coffee shops do: they don’t only sell coffee, they create shared public spaces. In creating such branded public spaces, of course, coffee chains also open up two very different types of opportunities for marketers.
The first opportunity lies in using the coffee shop as a proxy for a public space. Put one in a book store, or a mall, or a corporate campus and it works like an instant people magnet. Now academic libraries in the US are using coffee shops to lure students back into their folds (USA Today via Marginal Revolution):
A growing number of the nation’s 3,700 academic libraries — eager to lure students from wired coffee shops off campus — are following bookstores and public libraries in opening their doors to Starbucks and other coffee shops.
Now, only if the IIMB library had an all night coffee shop, I would not have strayed from the road to nerdistan! 
The second opportunity lies in using the coffee shop to engage with a young, upwardly mobile audience in a setting that is almost a second home to them. While some categories have a better fit with the coffee shop setting than others, do expect increasingly more marketers to experiment with such engagements. Coffee chains like Barista and Cafe Coffee Day, in fact, now look at such promos as a significant revenue stream and have structured rate cards for them. I hope my dear friend Naveen Pai - who owns the very popular Coffee Pai chain in Kolkata - is reading this.
Welcome back!
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Good to see you back, Gaurav
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Ah!! He’s back!! Why haven’t I noticed this until now?!
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Ah! You’re back… BTW I don’t understand if Barista and Cafe Coffee Day has caught on in India, why don’t we have independent coffee shops in business yet? Any idea?
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