Why did Jack Ma's father, Ding Lei, a pig farmer, and MUJI, a frigid man, open a coffee shop?

Professional barista communication, please pay attention to coffee workshop (Weixin Official Accounts cafe_style )

Today, I recommend an article about coffee consumption upgrading.

The coffee shop industry is fiercely competitive. If the catering industry is the Red Sea, then the coffee shop industry is the Blood Sea.

The theme cafe is a special form of cafe format. The theme cafe format is various, including anime theme cafe: game theme cafe: movie theme cafe: even maid theme cafe.

For Internet companies in the past, they have always relied on online traffic conversion to make money, and rarely went to the offline business, but as the Internet began to enter the second half, these Internet companies also began to enter the coffee industry.

The three cases analyzed by Totoro today are the programmer theme cafe opened by Jack Ma's father, as well as the brand-new Easy Room Cafe launched by Netease and Cafe muji launched by another lifestyle brand. Let's take a look at why these Internet companies and lifestyle brands want to cross into the coffee industry chain.

This article is about 4266 words, and you can choose the time you want to finish it.

Jack Ma's Dad's Programmer Cafe: Doing a Crowd Business

Coffee business is difficult to do in China, on the one hand because of fierce competition, on the other hand, because simply selling coffee business is not a good business model compared with restaurant business.

However, even if rents are high and labor costs rise, there are still many petty capitalists who go into the coffee shop field one after another.

On the one hand, compared with the traditional catering business, the cost of coffee shop investment is not large, compared with the restaurant often millions of investment, a 10 square meters small coffee shop is enough to restore a princess dream for girls.

Therefore, for many literary youth, opening a coffee shop is a way of life rather than a means of making money.

In addition, the business logic of many people investing in coffee shops in the Internet circle is to find the feeling of home. For many people who invest in crowd business, social space such as coffee shops is the entrance to obtain a large amount of high-end traffic resources. 3W coffee takes the latter path.

Therefore, many investors need to meet people in other people's coffee shops anyway. Under the condition of low investment, it is not so strange to open a coffee shop by themselves or crowdfunding.

Through the above analysis, we will find that the coffee shop itself may not be a good business, but as a medium and space, especially a space with a sense of social ceremony, the coffee shop is also a very good entrance to gather people.

I think the programmer cafe opened by Jack Ma's father is probably for this purpose. Let's first take a look at what Ma Yun's father's programmer cafe is like.

For Ma Yun's father, opening a coffee shop has never been a difficult problem. The difficult thing is that he has not done coffee industry before, and the rows are like mountains. So Ma Yun's first step is to cooperate with big coffee brands, and they choose to cooperate with classic coffee brands like Costa.

The location of this store is also very interesting. The first store is in Alibaba Cloud Office District, Yunqi Town, Hangzhou. Since this area is Alibaba Cloud's office area, it naturally has a large number of programmers.

Since this cafe is a programmer themed cafe, there must be many elements related to engineers and programmers in it:

1 In the theme of decoration choice, the space is full of dazzling keyboard and light bulbs, there are special for programmers to use the brain explosion blackboard.

2 Professional customized coffee for programmers. Programmers actually work hard and boring, and programmers usually need to work all night, so programmers have different coffee requirements.

The cafe offers a specially tailored Apsara coffee for programmers, which is a bit more bitter in bitterness. It is worth mentioning that Apsara is actually a global super-large-scale general purpose computer system independently developed by Alibaba Cloud. Look at this place. Every cup of coffee sold is an advertisement.

3 Implant gamified content related to programmers in the store. For example, set up a programmer challenge board, programmers can write questions on it, other programmers can do code solitaire, and the successful guest can take away a customized coffee cup.

And this part is actually the future entity space that Totoro has always mentioned will have more and more elements of content in it. Especially in many links, users are set to have more interaction and participation, so that users can deepen their understanding of the brand in interaction.

Aliyun related people also said that they will continue to replicate theme stores in other cities across the country.

Totoro Jun believes that the purpose of Alibaba Cloud Cafe is to attract vertical programmers through the medium of coffee, and the main users of Alibaba Cloud brand are still these programmers, so the emotional interaction with users through coffee shops is probably the real intention of Alibaba Cloud Coffee.

For a brand, if it is not in the offline physical space, giving consumers a clear perception and accessibility, consumers will not feel so intuitive about the brand. Therefore, transferring the display of the brand from online to offline is not just a traffic conversion so simple, more often still want to give the brand a touchable perspective.

Perhaps this is the real intention of Aliyun. If it was just for the coffee business, Aliyun wouldn't have gone to such a big trouble to open a coffee shop by himself. We can understand that it is good to cast a fixed interactive brand media advertisement online, not to mention that this content can be constantly changed, anyway, the hard and wide money is also a lot.

Ding Lei's Easy Room Cafe: The Next Strictly Selected Ambition

For Ding Lei, another Internet tycoon, opening a coffee shop is not as simple as an advertisement. After all, Ding Lei has done a lot of work on every product these years. If he wants to do it, of course, he must also have big dreams such as Weiyang Pig and Yan Xuan.

The first store of this cafe named Yijian opened in Zhujiang New Town, the core business district of Guangzhou. Guangzhou is also the place where Netease's dream begins. As Netease's first offline coffee shop, Yijian Coffee Shop is a coffee shop that integrates eating, social interaction, learning, entertainment and other attributes.

As a coffee shop, of course, the core product is coffee. According to public information, the coffee products provided by Yijian Coffee Shop are mainly boutique coffee, and at the same time, it also provides a variety of products including Italian coffee and creative coffee, as well as fruit tea, simple meals, desserts, etc.

The quality of coffee is also said to be excellent. The main coffee is personally produced by Lin Dongyuan, a world-class coffee master from Taiwan, so it is also very careful.

In the design of the whole space, Yijian Coffee also has ulterior motives, following Netease's consistent simplicity and small clear style, the space design is very open, Yijian logo also runs through all objects.

In short, in the user's word-of-mouth, has been rapidly promoted to Guangzhou's new network red coffee shop, it is said that unconsciously has begun to become the base of easy powder.

At present, there is no outstanding innovation difference in Yijian Cafe, but in view of Netease's entertainment gene, we will have reason to believe that Netease's rich content will run through this cafe system, such as whether Netease's popular game Yin Yang Shi IP will be integrated into offline cafe elements in the future, in fact, it is a thing worth looking forward to.

In my opinion, Netease coffee shop this thing is not strange at all, even can be said to be a natural thing, as a senior Netease cloud music powder, I have no doubt Ding Lei is an extremely excellent product manager.

Whether it is the hot Netease strict selection, or just recently financed Netease flavor pig, or the original Netease cloud music, Netease open class, Netease news client this series of products with a light idealistic color products, its characteristics, the crowd is around the pursuit of high-quality people's life consumption and layout.

Although Netease has never forced to get through the connection between these products, and even sometimes deliberately pursued the independent development of their respective products, it does not hinder, under this product temperament, the natural label between the user groups is consistent, that is, the pursuit of high quality life.

In the past, these user interactions were all done online, and even content products such as music and client suddenly had some faint social attributes, so Netease's ability to produce and let users interact socially was first-class.

It happens that coffee shops are such products with media and social attributes, and we have no reason to suspect that Netease will direct this attribute to offline formats.

At this time, opening a coffee shop is an ideal choice. In the future, this group of self-proclaimed users can easily move from online to offline, creating connections through the interaction of social elements. With such a carrier, the theme space of music, games and e-commerce elements will naturally be established.

Under this idea, I have no doubt that in the future, such temperament products as Zhihu and Douban, communities with similar user labels will also be able to enter such an offline business as coffee shops.

Users also need a more realistic carrier to carry the needs of user interaction. As for whether or not to open their own coffee shop, I think I have to talk to Zhou Yuan. I'm just assuming here.

Cafe muji's cold temperament: cross-border mix of MUJI

Finally, I want to say something about non-printed goods.

In recent years, in addition to the upsurge of learning Uniqlo, the domestic retail industry has raised an upsurge of learning the cold wind of MUJI. However, to be honest, it seems that few people can really learn the essence of MUJI. After all, business has its specific environment and restrictions. It is meaningless to talk about learning without this specific environment.

In recent years, Wuji has not completely focused on the main business, but played a lot of cross-border style, IKEA is a model of cross-border catering, so Wuji also unwilling to be lonely into the catering industry, and also opened its own hotel, some people even joked that Wuji good products will take care of your life.

Is it true that Muji is not working properly? I thought so at first, but then I thought about one thing. Wuji probably didn't regard itself as a lifestyle brand at all, but built itself according to a cultural attribute product. If so, would you think it would be abrupt for line to open cafes and theme stores?

Let's get back to the theme, Cafe muji. What does this cross-border cafe look like?

First of all, this store is located in Shanghai Joy City, which is the ninth beverage store opened by Wuji in the world.

Although it is called a coffee shop, it is a mixed-style shop. There are both coffee and tea in this drink shop. On the contrary, compared with the meal format before MUJI, there is relatively little food.

The main drinks of this beverage shop product line are Hangzhou West Lake Longjing, Fujian Jasmine Tea, Anxi Tieguanyin and other Chinese tea styles, while assisting with hand brewing, American coffee and other drinks, which is a bit of a mixture of style and Chinese and Western feeling.

For muji, the core of its cross-border thinking is not the category, but based on the connotation of its specific cultural brand, such as extremely simple design style and practical, simple, environmentally friendly, simple style, whether it is a small storage box, or a cup of tea continues the same style.

If from this point of view, Netease is somewhat similar to MUJI, around a group of specific similar user groups to do high-quality product layout, as for the product category is what, seems to be not so important.

Muji's cross-border logic is not to deliberately open a coffee shop or want to do coffee business, but to provide different products for users with the same life pursuit and values when users need them.

Therefore, the new generation of new consumer brands, emotional attributes and tonality are far greater than the functional needs of products. This may be the secret to the success of the new brand.

And how to have this tonality, first of all necessary is that the founder must have this taste, the founder's taste injected into the brand, became the brand's initial aesthetic and style.

Summary: Cross-border coffee, but no one just wants to sell coffee

Summarizing the above three cases of cross-border coffee shops, we found that everyone's real intention is not limited to the coffee shop itself, but to achieve the following goals through a carrier with strong social attributes such as coffee shops:

1. Amplify the temperament and tonality of one's own brand through carriers and media such as coffee shops, so that a virtual brand and image can be realized. Making money is definitely not the purpose, relying on space to amplify brand value is the real attempt, especially coffee shops can aggregate the attributes of specific groups of people. We call this action square value.

2 can enhance the sense of interaction with users. Bring users who have been interacting online to offline.

3 Amplify the media effect of coffee, move more online cultural symbols and content, interactive entertainment experience to offline, so that users have a better consumption experience.

As long as these goals have been achieved one or two, I believe Ma Yun's father and Ding Lei's goal will be achieved. After all, even if it is the worst, it is good to buy a media advertising screen with emotional interaction. So, I believe that more and more Internet companies will start to open coffee shops. Who do you think is next?