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.