Tag Archives: Cafe-Coffee-Day

Tea, Coffee or Me?

Tea Cocktails

Photo by Anush Wij

I was a coffee addict when I was younger, but if you open my kitchen cabinet now, you’ll find several packs of Tetley tea bags (standard, masala, ginger, lemon, Earl Gray and green tea), a jar of Dabur honey, several packs of Equal sachets and a lonesome jar of Nescafe Classic coffee.

My usual breakfast routine is to put in two tea bags and three mugs of water in a carafe, put it in the microwave, set the timer for three minutes, add some cut fruits to a large bowl of Good Earth museli, take out the carafe from the microwave, add a sachet of Equal to it, find the book I was reading when I fell asleep and sit down on my dining table for a half an hour date with myself.

At office, the canteen boy has express instructions to bring me a cup of black tea every hour, and I’m not even counting the many cups a day I end up having with my visitors.

A Starbucks in the College Library?

Coffee

Photo by Una Cierta Mirada

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.