Week 13A: Online Advertising - Analysis of the Marketplace

            There are numerous examples to follow for advertising when it comes to cafes and coffee shops. Three large-scale examples of these are Starbucks, Coffee Bean and Pete’s Coffee. Two smaller examples are Blue Bottle Coffee and Holsem Coffee in North Park, San Diego. While they each have their own intricacies in their advertising models overall, the larger companies tend to be similar to one another and the smaller ones vary depending on what their goal is. The big companies like Starbucks are more about quantity over quality. They focusing on making sure they have a store on every block and make their logos and products extremely recognizable so that they are what people think of when coffee comes to their mind. An example of what smaller companies might do, like Holsem, is build with the community and advertise directly to them be portraying a certain feel and unique product. I think both these types of advertising are effective because you see how successful they are in what they do and how some of these smaller brands have developed. When it comes to their social media they rotate between fun, relatable and vivid imagery to make people crave their product. If they are promoting a certain coffee they may not even use the coffee itself in the ad but the imagery they use immediately lets you know what they are selling. That is what draws me in, for example Starbucks’ holiday cups with clever designs and make me crave a hot cup of coffee in cold weather. While sometimes these company’s calls to action vary most of the time they push the idea of needing coffee (caffeine) to get through the day. Other times they will advertise that they are donating to a certain cause when you buy their product, which is a call to action to help others and give. When they do show the coffee, steaming, being poured into a cup or cold brew being slowly dripped over ice, the imagery they use is plain and repetitive but is also effective and makes people want it. When these ads get too far away from coffee and what they are actually selling is when they can get annoying, especially if they are putting these outs every 5 minutes. In the past, coffee companies used traditional forms of advertising like newspapers, magazines and billboards and although ads like this worked well a decade ago an still do today, advertising through social media is much more effective. People aged 18-40 are the majority of consumers in America and almost all of them have smart phones where they get all of their information. Because of this, it is more effective to reach them through social media and other online avenues.

Till next time…x