Revealed: Nation’s flimsiest coffee-related press release
Posted by TheShot on 20 Apr 2011 | Tagged as: Consumer Trends, Foreign Brew, Home Brew, Local Brew, Machine, Quality Issues
Earlier this week, KRUPS, that bastion of great coffee, announced the winners of their National “Cup O’ Joe Awards”: Revealed: Nation’s best coffee shops – This Just In – Budget Travel. Now if only this announcement had anything legitimately to do with good coffee. Heck, if only KRUPS had anything legitimately to do with good coffee.
Of course, what we really have is one of the oldest tricks in the PR playbook: fabricate some kind of award (the broader the better — for potential distribution), issue your press release, and pray that it gets picked up in your target markets. The technique works, because we’re picking up the story here. Just probably not in the way KRUPS’ marketing department intended.
Over the past 20 years, KRUPS has probably done more to disappoint more home espresso consumers than any other company, and a multitude of American landfills contain much of the evidence. To counter this reputation, KRUPS has resorted to associating itself with “upmarket” coffee — such as years of sponsoring barista championships. Here KRUPS created a new Cup O’ Joe Awards out of thin air to honor the nation’s best coffee places — and to remind consumers to keep filling their landfills with KRUPS coffee equipment (and not just KRUPS waffle makers and deep fryers).
One signature of the fabricated press release award is when the award winners have never heard of it. Another is carpet bombing high density population centers (i.e., home espresso machine consumers) to maximum effect. Thus KRUPS ignores Portland, OR, quality coffee’s Biggie Smalls, while New York City, quality coffee’s Jay-Z, gets awards for each of five boroughs.
And when it comes to the criteria for why one place inches out another in a given market for this coveted award, we learn the criteria involves “mailers, street teams and social media pages.” It’s Battle of the Bands all over again.
From their press release: “Krups USA polled 250 coffee-toting New Yorkers on the streets of each borough to discover their picks for the city’s best sips.” Can you imagine a SCAA barista champion crowned without the use of scoresheets — but instead by some quasi-magical popularity contest involving random street interviews, mailings, and Facebook Likes?
The San Francisco award went to Blue Bottle Coffee, which is hardly unwarranted. But KRUPS awarding the nation’s best coffee shops is a bit like Chef Boyardee awarding America’s best Italian restaurants.
4 Comments »
i just realized something after being a long time reader of your blog, you have become very negative. when was the last positive post? i realize thats not what your blog is all about but christ you are one negative nelly. not everything can be so bad can it? cheers.
Oh, we have absolutely noticed. (See: #10.) This is almost a topic unto itself. Perhaps a future post?
Our last semi-positive post was probably our review of Grand Coffee with our last truly positive piece being Brown Owl Coffee.
Now we’ve always been prone to sarcasm and even a certain iconoclastic streak. But that alone is insufficient to explain why we have even caught ourselves asking, “Are we being too negative all the time?” before posting our next missive. After all, it’s no mystery that the ebullient, sunny posts are what motivate people to read and share.
We’ve come to a sort of conclusion that since we started this blog in 2005, the quality coffee world has changed a lot — and mostly for the better. But in the last couple of years, it has plateaued and become stuck in a stasis in many ways.
As the supply of great coffee shops have grown, there’s a rampant copycat mentality among coffee shops now imitating each other — creating a sort of rigid orthodoxy or dogma that, today, makes screwballs like Philz Coffee seem like radicals. One coffee shop replaces their Clover brewer with Hario V60s, and within months all the sheep follow. Local coffee pros echo each other’s trite Third Wave clichés across the globe in interviews. Monolithic opinions pervade about everything from roasting styles to blends. Purveyors wave the Third Wave flag as if to take full credit for the changing and more discriminating tastes of coffee consumers.
And while that’s all been stuck in the mire, what’s really still changing is the business of hype with little substance — promising consumers a revolution in coffee every month that never delivers. The business of coffee has grown a lot, and so has the marketing hype, the number of profiteers, and the haze and fog of positive spin — i.e., the language of sales and marketing.
So we find ourselves needing to (over?)compensate while also to shine a brighter light through the haze and fog. And like you — one of our poor, suffering readers — we don’t know how you’ve managed to put up with it. With us.
We wish we were a lot more optimistic rather than pessimistic about today’s state of quality coffee. Fortunately we occasionally get a glimpse of other coffee cultures that have gone their own way ever so slightly, such as South Africa, and that’s been reason to be upbeat. But we are hopeful even here. That as when punk rock refreshingly broke the tiresome conventions of the progressive 70s rock that preceded it, this is a necessary step for coffee to bloom and blossom into something diverse and interesting again.
very good explaination. i appreciate the detailed response instead of just writing the comment off. what you said makes sense. maybe i can balance it out by reading your blog while my son is watching his insanely positive little einstein videos. thanks again.
We need more positivity these days, absolutely. We’ve just been really challenged to draw on something for inspiration.