San Francisco gets a disloyalty card, but we kinda still don’t
Posted by TheShot on 21 Jan 2011 | Tagged as: Local Brew, Starbucks
If you’re not aware of the disloyalty card concept, it originated a couple years ago in the UK from former world barista champ, Gwilym Davies. The kicker is that it’s supposed to be the opposite of a customer loyalty card, where consumers are given financial incentives for repeat business. Like the kind you get from the big chains such as Starbucks and Peet’s Coffee.
Instead, the informal disloyalty “card” offers financial incentives for consumers to sample the coffee at a variety of independent coffee shops in town — using something of a nudge-nudge, wink-wink informal honor system. The concept has since been mimicked in Seattle, Atlanta, Calgary, and elsewhere, and now it’s apparently come to San Francisco: San Francisco Gets a Dis*Loyalty Card | ShotZombies. Participants in the SF card program include Stable Café, Epicenter Cafe, Coffee Bar, Sightglass, Ma’velous, Farm:Table, Four Barrel, and Ritual Roasters.
The idea has not only spread around the world, but it has even earned a few accolades of genius marketing from a few notables in the industry. We may have groaned in full-facepalm position when Gwilym Davies started spouting from the Gospel according to the Third Wave after winning the WBC crown. But he deserves credit for coming up with a cute concept. But beyond a cute concept, that’s where we never really quite got it.
What dampens our enthusiasm for the concept is that it just moves the goalposts a little further back — rather than refute them altogether. So instead of locking repeat consumer zombies into one chain, we spread them over a few more cash registers. It essentially suggests replacing a monopoly with a cartel. To be truly effective, a program should encourage people to go beyond even the boundaries of something like the participants on a disloyalty card. But then again, we’ve gone beyond boundaries that any sane person ever should…
UPDATE: March 2, 2011
Here’s a curious refinement on the disloyalty card concept: Explore Chicago’s Independent Coffee Shops with Tour de Cafe – Chicagoist. Here the emphasis is on making it a $20 pre-paid card.
UPDATE: Sept. 13, 2011
Toronto’s version of the $25 pre-paid card has been renewed for a second year with new participants (and a few drop-outs): Indie Coffee Passport returns for year two.
19 Comments »
hi there. my name is alex and i put together the san francisco disloyalty card. i appreciate you bringing attention to the card, and i’m sorry you don’t get it. the concept of the card is simple. go try coffees from 8 different bay area roasters, and one of them will give you a free drink. stable represents de la paz, ma velous represents ecco, coffee bar represents mr. espresso, epicenter represents barefoot, and farm:table represents verve, so there’s 8 different and excellent roasters on the card. its a punch card, just like loyalty cards, so each cafe will use its own marking system when you have a drink. no “nudge-nudge, wink-wink” about it. its about connecting the coffee community in the bay area by encouraging folks to try roasters they’ve never tried and visit cafes they’ve never been to. we only printed 1000, and each participating cafe got a stack to hand out. the card can be completed in any order so the free drink burden will be split up amongst participants. we’ll see how things go this year and hopefully put together another next year. any suggestions you have to improve the concept would be appreciated. my email is alex(at)ritualroasters(dot)com.
No, we get that part. We also get that it’s a way to inspire a narrow segment of consumers who maybe need a financial incentive to try out a different coffee spot.
What we don’t get about it is that it essentially replaces a monopoly with a cartel as its core value. This limits the concept’s overall appeal and effectiveness. At its best, it codifies a sort of pre-fixed coffee crawl (like a pub crawl) with a free drink tossed in at the end as a reward for completing it. And at best, it ends there.
But don’t take it personally. There’s a lot of clever ideas that don’t really have much value or legs beyond their initial conception. And then we don’t quite get the point of Internet-order coffee intermediaries as a viable business model either.
I’m sorry, @TheShot, but that’s a really dumb reason to be against this. This is a great idea that’s intended to shine a little light on a bunch of independent businesses who are, collectively, not even making a tiny dent in the profits of Starbucks on a national level. Anything people do to encourage the public to try them out is a positive trend, even if it isn’t as free thinking as you’d like. (You should also look up the definition of cartel, since you’ve said it twice: “a formal organization of producers and manufacturers that agree to fix prices, marketing, and production”).
Also, your reply to Alex was a bit rude (“there’s a lot of clever ideas that don’t really have much value”). It sounds like you have an alternate agenda. Do you support someone who’s not on this list? I noticed that Starbucks is the biggest tag in your tag cloud …
@Ian: Never said we were against the idea. Just that we didn’t think it was a good enough idea worth repeating in multiple cities. Fortunately we live in a city where it is possible. But the value is more in the concept itself than in any execution of it. This isn’t a “disloyalty” card program — it’s essentially a pre-fixed scavenger hunt for coffee tourists with a coffee prize awarded at the end for completing it.
Unlike a loyalty program, it does not encourage sustained visits to all of the same independent cafés. Of the few people who do these (and we know of very few people who liked the idea enough to follow up on it), we have yet to hear of a single person who has repeated the cycle more than once. The program also does nothing for consumers beyond its narrow circle of cafés.
Is it a clever idea? Yes. Does it garner enough of a critical mass of consumers to try out new places to warrant a multinational roll-out of such a program? Absolutely not. Not all clever ideas have a material impact that makes them worth franchising — at least beyond their role as conversation pieces.
The disloyalty card’s greatest value is in exposing consumers to their new favorite coffee place. But there are plenty more ways, and arguably far better ones, for doing just that. And that might even include a site such as ours for highlighting 656 alternatives in San Francisco alone to your “favorite” Starbucks here.
I don’t think the point of this is to get people to “repeat the cycle” (i.e. retrace one’s steps, visiting each coffee shop again in order). I think it’s purpose is to tell people about some other good coffee shops in the area that they may not already know about, and encourage them to try them out. People learning to appreciate good coffee benefits all of these coffee roasters.
Definitely. But a loyalty card program is entirely about repeat business. So if the goal is to educate consumers about alternate places to try, there are many other, more effective means to do that.
“Blah blah, MONOPOLY. Blah, blah, CARTEL”
Those words you keep using, “monopoly” and “cartel,” do not mean what you think they mean.
Please gain some degree of economic literacy, instead of using bullet words in a poor attempt to convey your negative feelings couched in misappropriated jargon. (*cough, typical leftist*)
The innovative dis-loyalty card is a great idea!
Re: “The innovative dis-loyalty card is a great idea!”
Two words: prove it. We dare you to find a single coffee market that will sustain — or has sustained — the idea for more than a few months of limited novelty.
For example, the Calgary program launched with its own Web site in September … and still only has one blog post, its self announcement, to show for it.
I think you’re looking at the system the wrong way. Unlike a traditional card system, the main focus of the disloyalty card is not to encourage repeat business. The idea is birthed out of a larger effort to migrate the way that people think about coffee. While in industries like wine or beer, trying multiple producers is very natural, in coffee people tend to be extremely brand loyal. People look at quality in black and white terms – this roaster is better than other roasters. While the immediate economic benefit for that particular roaster is obvious, this mindset is limiting for an industry. There’s good reason that other industries have worked to distance themselves from it. The disloyalty card is simply a piece of this movement. Even if you don’t feel the card accomplishes this effectively, I would argue that you should support the card simply in hopes that other, similarly motivated efforts will evolve.
The disloyalty card is ultimately a product in its own right. And like any other product, its success is determined by how much it is adopted in the marketplace.
A lack of consumer adoption can reflect either unmet needs, meeting needs that either aren’t important or don’t exist with consumers, better alternatives on the marketplace, etc.
We see the disloyalty card program as a clever concept but ultimately a commercially unsuccessful idea. Why? Because it provides limited benefit at addressing a rather niche and fleeting customer need.
We wholeheartedly support the idea of exposing consumers to new coffee places and alternatives. But supporting something that only addresses a small portion of the problem, and does so in a limited fashion, doesn’t make a lot of sense when that support could be put behind more effective alternatives.
Normally I wouldn’t comment but something about your whole attitude just pissed me off here. You are coming across as a sanctimonious douche, and I don’t quite understand why.
Firstly, you’ve completely misinterpreted the idea of this sort of card. It is not a product in its own right. It is a promotional tool. The only gauge of its success is if it sells more coffee at one or more of the locations listed on the card.
Coming from SF and having moved to Calgary recently, the point in town here was not about the use of the card as incentive for free coffee as it is grouping together different coffee shops that share the same commitment to quality. Same in Toronto, which also has a variant (which I happened to see at Sam James Coffee Bar when I was there last Summer). Most people have never heard of these local shops but once they’ve been to one, a disloyalty card gives them a list of others in different neighbourhoods to encourage them to “buy local” rather than another cup of Starbucks or Tim Hortons. I’ve given it to friends & co-workers who would like seek out good coffee in town but aren’t coffee geeks scouring the internets for the hot new place.
You keep saying that “there are many other, more effective means” to educate people on alternative coffee places. Firstly, give me an example of a more effective means of promotion that you speak of (not doubting it exists, just curious what you have in mind). Secondly, why would such a card be the ONLY way a group of shops do promotion? It’s not like it requires a lot of investment — print some cards, distribute them, put up a website. It’s simple, it’s cheap, it make sense to most (excepting yourself), and last I checked it wasn’t being seen as the “last great hope for good coffee”.
It’s just a promotional tool.
It’s not a product.
It’s co-marketing.
It doesn’t have a huge opportunity cost vs. other approaches.
Thanks.
We don’t want to keep harping on Web sites because this will invariably sound like self-promotion and competitively dismissing alternatives. We started Coffeeratings.com over 7 years ago with many of the same goals in mind that were behind the inception of the card program, so we’ve been thinking about this for a while now. But let’s instead take the site ManSeekingCoffee.
It may not get you a free coffee after completing a circuit. But it will educate you on more than a few self-selected places — the finite and self-selected part being one of our bigger beefs with the card program. For example, we get that making a short list is always going to have its glaring omissions that people will argue over. But looking at the SF card alone, for whatever reasons of program participation, that Blue Bottle Coffee isn’t represented in café or even coffee form on there is quite a glaring omission for any fan of quality coffee in the city.
And unlike the card program, a Web site like Man Seeking Coffee is always renewable and evolves, it encourages continued use and referral and doesn’t simply end with the 8th shop address, and it educates and guides in a long-term, sustainable fashion. It also takes a stand in identifying what might be good and what might even be better.
At least for us, a site like Man Seeking Coffee accomplishes these same goals at an almost ridiculously better level than a card program does on all counts, save for a free coffee tossed in. We’d rather see shops promoting Man Seeking Coffee long before they try to instead attract consumers with a far less effective card program.
We wish we could support everything, successful concepts and ones less so. But contrary to your fundamental assumptions here, the consumer attention span is finite. We live in an era where all businesses are competing for consumer attention as the resource that is in the scarcest supply. We live in an attention deficit economy. So if we’re going to use that resource, we should use it to better extents where possible.
there’s nothing sadder in the whole wide world than a solitary man writing a coffee blog who insists on referring to himself as ‘we’
We respectfully disagree. Or at least disagree.
Of course, we know you Sprudgeheads find it difficult to figure out the topic of discussion. We suggest you start from the top. You’ll discover that this Internet blog thing tends to work that way.
Sigh.
Listen, Greg, this Disloyalty Card, it’s great. I show it to guests at Four Barrel all the time. It’s especially useful to tourists who want to check out a lot of great cafes. It’s all there, like a miniature coffee guide. Shops that are happy to promote other shops in our region.
That’s all. It’s not pretending to fix a “problem”. It’s just a sweet little card that promotes some solid coffee companies in the Bay Area.
You’re doing a great job ruffling feathers, but deep down, I think you know that. And it seems like that’s the only reason you even write blog posts like this.
Your friend,
Z-Man 5000
Hand out business cards for Man Seeking Coffee is all we ask. More options, more complete coverage, more details as desired, a place to go back to when you’re done fooling around. Is this really that hard? Do you even have a line to draw between better vs. worse ideas, or do they all just sort of blur together like one big tossed salad of opportunity? What color is the sun in your world?
Though we suppose you could argue that if investors had followed this advice of pursuing weaker ideas, we would have all gone bankrupt on Pets.com stock and saved ourselves from the 2008 real estate and economic meltdown entirely.
Hey — we’ve got another idea too. Let’s promote other great coffee houses by providing T-shirts of our favorite places to the smelly homeless guys who camp out in front of our shop. We take care of two problems: clothing the chronically chemically dependent, and suggesting good coffee alternatives in town. It’s hip. It’s edgy. We tell our coffee tourist customers that the guys in T-shirts are just off-duty baristas from the other shops, and they won’t know the difference!
Genius. Only an assclown would think that’s a weak idea. And given that all ideas are inherently good ideas and should be pursued with impunity, and that critical thinking has no place in pursuing a goal, we’re going to syndicate the program internationally. Somebody get us a Stevie Award application, stat!
Love,
The Management
You lost me.
i just read your latest post and i agree that brown owl is exactly the type of place that a program like the disloyalty card should promote, and i’ll argue that it does, however indirectly.
first, a not about how the roasters and cafes were chosen. the card i put together was in conjunction with good food month, so the only roasters invited were good food award entrants. and yes, all local roasters that submitted coffees to the good food awards were invited to take part in the card. the 8 represented agreed to take part and submitted the necessary details before the printing deadline. the roasters that don’t have san francisco brick and mortar locations chose the wholesale account to represent them. there was no self selecting. i didn’t pick favorites.
2 of the big differences between a site like yours and the dis*loyalty card are the audience, and the ratings. people can learn about coffee shops at your site, but they need the internet and the desire to seek coffee information there, and they need to rely on or filter your opinions. if someone relies on your ratings, why would they ever want to try #677, or even #2? if they filter your opinions, they might just look for a place near them that serves their favorite roaster. neither option does much to promote the greater coffee community. the dis*loyalty card is available to any person that visits one of the participating cafe. it says nothing about the quality of the coffee at the cafes, nor does it say that it represents the 8 best cafes in the city. it makes the assumption that most coffee shop customers don’t know about all 8 roasters/cafes represented, so its purpose is to alert customers of one of the cafes to the existence of the others, and gives them a small (but arguably fun) incentive to try them all. from the feedback of the participants, it also creates a dialogue. as customers present their card to be stamped, employees can ask them what they thought of the other cafes, because they know right away where they’ve been. and as new roasters pop up in the city, they too become part of the conversation. for instance, if someone stops into farm:table, places like hooker’s, little bird, or contraband will inevitable come up. places like browl owl will be part of that conversation, and it won’t be “i give them an 8.2 out of 10″, it will be “they are new, and its a cute shop, and they’re really sweet people, and you should try them”.
that’s not to say that there isn’t a place for the internet or consumer reviews in the world of specialty coffee, but programs like the dis*loyalty card are very different at their core.
thanks everyone, i love the dialogue.
alex
To be clear going back to the beginnings, I never thought the disloyalty card was a bad idea at all. I’ve always thought it’s a rather clever one. And it’s certainly good for the eight cafés on the card.
But it isn’t extensible, it isn’t easily updated, and as such it’s a kind of Band-Aid solution to the problem. It quickly loses effectiveness at its mission beyond those eight cafés. And it loses its effectiveness beyond the few, limited souls who are its target market.
Its targeted customer base isn’t people generally interested in new coffee shops in the area, because they’ll grow out of the program very quickly. It’s not people who are somewhat knowledgeable or have their special preferences about coffee, as the only thing the card offers is a loose association with no qualitative information beyond that.
What the program does target is a small, self-selecting group of people who make the rare decision to step into one of these eight shops (say, instead of their usual chain stores), are at the right point in the curiosity curve to take next steps, and haven’t yet experienced the few others on the card. Sliced that way, the demographics for this program to be effective are extremely narrow and limited.
That said, best of luck to you guys. We’re fighting the same fight. Just with different weapons.
But I couldn’t let this part go in passing: the “Good Food Awards” always struck me as a slap in coffee’s face. Any publication, association, or award that does not acknowledge coffee as a drink — and not the red-headed, mutant stepchild of the food world — is by definition giving coffee second-class status in how they approach it. Now I know a lot will disagree with that statement, and I can’t say we didn’t enjoy the coffee at its progenitor, Slow Food Nation ’08. But there’s a reason the much-looked-up-to wine has earned “food & wine” status as opposed to just “food”. Coffee is still tagging along like a dumb, happy puppy in this regard — eager to please and overjoyed to even be invited to the table at all.