Youth in India are increasingly influenced by Western culture thanks to cable television and more travel outside the country. As a result, coffee drinking has become a social statement for young upwardly mobile Indians. Café Coffee Day, a division of India’s Amalgamated Bean Coffee Trading Company Ltd., pioneered the modern coffee shop in India in the late 1990s, focusing on serving good quality organic coffee. The café chain saw incredible success, growing to 918 cafes in over 139 cities in India, plus six outlets abroad, from 1996 to 2010. It is now India’s biggest café chain. But Café Coffee Day’s achievements made the market very attractive to competitors, and over a ten-year period both established and upstart cafes saw similar success.
Cafe Coffee Day: Inspiring coffee-fueled fun and conversation in India
Challenge
Café Coffee Day came to Landor because it wanted to remain relevant and differentiated in the minds of its target audience: upwardly mobile 18- to 25-year-olds. Facing competition from both serious coffee-rooted brands like Barista and youth-focused brands like Javagreen, and anticipating the arrival of foreign entrants such as Gloria Jean’s and Starbucks, how could Café Coffee Day maintain its leadership position? How could it appeal to the idealism of its young target customer? Landor’s challenge was to refresh the brand and make it modern.
Solution
Landor’s big idea was for Café Coffee Day to become a social hub for young people—a modern day adda (colloquial word for “hangout” in Hindi). Cafes would be a place for the young, and young at heart, to come together, stylish spaces where the fun and humorous ambiance was as important as the coffee. Coffee would be presented as more than a beverage or product, but a catalyst for long chats, philosophical discussions, political debate, making connections, and developing new ideas.
Landor created the look and feel for Café Coffee Day, mapped the customer journey, and developed product, service, and marketing concepts rooted in the new big idea. Menu cards, wall graphics, waiters’ aprons, crockery, and cutlery all provided opportunities to engage in dialogue with customers. We created the playful and vibrant “dialogue box” visual element, an oversized quotation mark that resembles a comic-style “talking box” or open-mouthed talking face. Dialogue boxes are used throughout the cafes in conjunction with copy to communicate that Café Coffee Day is a contemporary, stylish, and youthful place for coffee-fueled fun.
Brand voice
A key part of the refreshed brand was the ownable language we created, a brand voice to bring Café Coffee Day’s personality to life. The brand voice had to sound hip and speak the language of the young upwardly mobile target customers. Copy used on mugs speaks to their tastes and attitude with phrases such as, “coffee smoother than words,” “my coffee inside,” and “I will share anything except this latte.” Wall graphics that proclaim, “if these walls could talk, they would join your conversations,” “great minds drink alike,” and “chat, drink, and be merry,” demonstrate the brand’s witty sense of humor and encourage free debate and fun conversation. It was critical to strike a delicate balance between being humorous and being intelligent and cool.
Results
Café Coffee Day’s new positioning and clever voice is starting to show results for the company. It won "India's Most Preferred Brand" in the retail/cafe category in the 2010 CNBC Awaaz Consumer Awards. In 2010, Café Coffee Day had a 75 percent share of the Indian retail coffee market—a figure it predicts will reach 80 percent within three years. Over the next four years, Café Coffee Day aims to expand further abroad and increase its number of cafes to 2,000; it predicts that within seven years revenues will reach one billion dollars. Director Alok Gupta of India's Café Coffee Day said, “We are happy to share that our moves have connected well with coffee lovers as we are seeing higher growth in cafés where these changes have been effected.”
