Posted by TheShot on 11 Oct 2011 | Tagged as: Café Society, Consumer Trends
That’s the question UK-based marketing consultancy tried to answer on their blog recently: Coffee Marketing: Why So Romantic? | Market Sentinel. The firm was approached by a company attempting to launch a new brand of coffee, and they wanted to know the subjects of public conversations concerning coffee in social media and other public contexts. [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 10 Aug 2011 | Tagged as: Consumer Trends, Starbucks
We smelled a familiar rat the first time we read it: I Am Jonathan’s Starbucks Card: A Social Payment Experiment (With Free Coffee) | TechCrunch. A programmer/writer publicly offers up his Starbucks Card as a social experiment for people around the world to contribute to and withdraw from his pre-paid Starbucks account. It just sounded [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 16 Mar 2011 | Tagged as: Café Society, Consumer Trends, Local Brew
Taking up the space that was formerly Daniel Creamery and its cheese production, the Summit has tall ceilings in a wide open space converted for café and art space use. The main seating area is littered with rectangular tables and chairs with plenty of wall outlets and laptop zombies — making you feel like you [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 12 Feb 2011 | Tagged as: Barista, Café Society, Consumer Trends
The New York Times published an article this week (due in the NY Times Magazine tomorrow) from its coffee beat regular, Oliver Strand: Japan’s Pour-Over Coffee Wins Converts – NYTimes.com. It’s a relatively effective trend piece — dealing more with pop culture and a sort of social anthropology than anything it says about coffee. But [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 03 Feb 2011 | Tagged as: Add Milk, Barista, Beans, Café Society, Consumer Trends, Machine
Many in the coffee industry speak volumes about wanting to market themselves to the public as the “new wine.” But if we examine the practices the industry has taken on to accomplish any of this, it has failed miserably on nearly all fronts. What becomes all too clear is that the coffee industry either doesn’t [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 12 Oct 2010 | Tagged as: Coffee Health, Consumer Trends
When I was a biomedical engineering PhD student at Berkeley, a wise veteran lab partner once told me, “Statistics allow you to suggest anything you want. Just start with a conclusion and find a pattern in the data that fits to confirm it.” I’m reminded of that every time I read about research studies published [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 30 Aug 2010 | Tagged as: Consumer Trends, Local Brew, Roasting
Last week we wrote about how coffee, like food, has become a primary form of consumer entertainment. We also mentioned recent experiences at newer coffee bars that have felt, well, “manipulative and artificial.” This concern over what seems real might sound trivial, but it’s at the foundation of a great deal of consumer behavior and [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 24 Aug 2010 | Tagged as: Café Society, Consumer Trends, Starbucks
Please repeat after me: “Food and drink is entertainment.” What do I mean by that? Public tastes in entertainment change. We no longer attend social dances or go to the circus. In fact, if someone probably heard their neighbors were doing that, they would hide any of their small children. And instead of seeing the [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 07 Oct 2009 | Tagged as: Consumer Trends, Starbucks
Online social media is hardly new. Online BBSes have existed since the 1970s. Even yours truly geeked out for a bit on packet radio in the 1980s. But today we have reached a sort of critical mass on the Internet where, like sex and drugs in the 1960s, “everyone is doing it”. Except that “everyone” [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 24 Sep 2009 | Tagged as: Café Society, Consumer Trends
If you’ve noticed the sound of crickets around here lately, you’re not the only one. Sure, we’ve been quietly plodding along at updating our espresso reviews. But the media coverage on coffee over the past few weeks has been boring and uneventful. That is until this week, when we came across two examples of how [...]
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