BRAND IDENTITY
Have you read Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy?
Buying starbucks coffee is like having a towell. People who see you drinking Starbucks coffee assume that you're a hip upper middle class pseudo intelectual who listens to jazz and the Rolling Stones, drives a Volvo and is worried about Global Warming.
People who see you drinking Java Time cofee assume that you were to cheap to go to Starbucks because they don't accept foodstamps.
Also Predictibility
People know what they're getting when they go to Starbucks. Decent quality, high prices, and qucik service. People like comfort. It's not comforting to go to a new coffee shop when you know what you're going to get at Starbucks. This is also the reason most people don't open up Burger Time! In places that have a MacDonalds near by. It doesn't even matter that MacDonalds hamburgers suck, as long as they suck consistently so people know what to expect. Xenophobia is the death of most small retail buisness.
There is also the little matter of the fact that
STARBUCKS HAS A BILLION TIMES THE MARKET SHARE, NAME RECOGNITION, AND ADVERTISING BUDGET THAT YOU DO
Every heard of BeOS? Probably not. It was stunningly well thought out and designed operating system in the early '90s. Sold for less than Windows, did more, was super stable, destroyed Windows in any sort of benchmark testing etc.
No one bought it.
Want some free advice?
Find a targeted demographic you want to sell to and HAMMER them with geurilla advertising. Do stupid things that get you name recognition. Loose money on purpose. Give cofee away on Tuesdays for a month all day. Hire strippers. Light the store on fire once a week. Whatever it takes to get people to know that your place exists at all. Then you'll be past the hardest part of comepting against a Fortune 500 company.
There's a place called Fuel in Boston, in Kenmore Sq. Right across from Fenway. It's a coffee shop, it was also right next to a Starbucks. They were able to tailor their marketing to a specefic demographic to the point that the Starbucks moved. I remember being there at 2am during the celebration they threw when the Starbucks closed down. (of course there's still like 98 of them in Boston, but that's not the point).
This is what they did. I realize it's not your style, but it's a demonstration in how targeted marketing can work.
On weekdays they opened at Midnight and closed at 4pm. They were open continuously from 6pm Friday till 4pm Sunday. They developed ludicrously silly custom drinks to compliment their normal offerings. My particular favorite was "the Melvin". It was 9 shots of espresso in 32 ounces of steamed milk flavored with orange syrup. $10 a pop, but if you couldn't make it to work or class after a Melvin at 3 AM you were likely dead. They employed hip young college kids, didn't care if they showed up late and let them play whatever music they felt like.
Did this drive away 40 year old Volvo driving soccer moms getting the morning skim decaff latte? Sure, but they were going to Starbucks anyway. They let people post things on a massive buliten board and didn't care much what it was. They lit kids sit around for four hours and not buy anything. They sold about 1000 tee shirts (designed by one of the kids who worked there) the first year ($20 each). They became in short a destination rather than a coffee shop. They became the place everyone went to sober up, as well as the place people went in the morning to feel connected to the college kid scene regardless of how old they were.
They established a demographic (young, don't give a **** and free) and marked toward that demographic untill they became INDENTIFIED with it. People who wanted to be young and carefree bought silly $10 cups of coffee in the way they wear Dock Martens on casual Fridays. "Hey look, I'm cool too!"
I'd recomend you do smoenthing simmiliar.
You need to do something to get people *IN* to the place. If your coffee sucks, well you're screwed anyway. If it's great then people will come back. If you can provide with them a $3 feeling that they're something they're not all the better. Hire 19 year old coeds named "Missy" and dress them up like Pilgrims. Anything to get people to say to other people "Have you been to Java Time? That's the strangest place I've ever been. Good coffee though."
Just my humble recomendation.
Edited, Tue Jan 6 20:45:58 2004 by Smasharoo
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