There is a great demand for offline communication, will it be a good idea for Internet companies to open cafes?

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Recently, there has been a very strange phenomenon in the coffee market. Some Internet companies and lifestyle brands have joined the market. For example, Ali opened a programmer-themed coffee shop, NetEase launched Yi Jian Cafe, and MUJI launched Cafe MUJI. Why do these enterprises set up cafes? Is it attracted by the capacity of the coffee market, or is it for other purposes?

Jack Ma's father's programmer coffee shop: it's a crowd business.

The coffee business is difficult in China, partly because of the fierce competition, and partly because the business of selling coffee alone is not a good business model compared with the restaurant business.

But even with high rents and rising labor costs, many petty bourgeoisie have entered the coffee shop one after another to start their own businesses.

On the one hand, compared with the traditional catering business, the cost of the coffee shop is not large. Compared with the millions of investment of the restaurant, a small coffee shop of 10 square meters is enough to restore a princess dream to the girls. So for many young writers and artists, opening a coffee shop is a way of life rather than a means of making money.

In addition, the business logic of many people in the Internet circle to invest in coffee shops is to find a sense of home. For many people in the investment crowd business, the social space such as coffee shops is the entrance to a large number of high-end traffic resources, and 3W Coffee takes the latter path.

All the people gathered in 3W are entrepreneurs.

So because many investors need to meet people in other people's coffee shops anyway, it is not so strange to open their own coffee shop or crowdfunding coffee shop when the investment is not high.

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 with a sense of social ritual, the coffee shop is also a very good entrance to gather people.

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

Nine of the 10 customers are programmers

For Jack Ma's father, opening a coffee shop has never been a difficult problem, but the difficulty is that he has never been in the coffee industry before. So Jack Ma's first step is to cooperate with big coffee brands, and they choose to cooperate with classic coffee brands such as Costa.

The location of this store is also very interesting. The first store is located in Aliyun office district, a small town in Yunqi, Hangzhou. Because this area is Ali Yun's office area, it naturally has a large number of programmers.

Since this coffee shop is a programmer-themed coffee shop, there must be a lot of elements related to engineers and programmers:

1. In the theme choice of decoration, the space is full of dazzling keyboards and light bulbs, as well as brainstorming blackboards for programmers.

The world of programmers is difficult for others to understand easily.

two。 Professional custom-made coffee for programmers. In fact, programmers' work is boring and hard, and programmers usually have to stay up all night, so programmers have different requirements for coffee.

The coffee shop offers customized Apsara coffee for programmers, which is more bitter in terms of bitterness. It is worth mentioning that Apsara (Feitian) is actually a global very large-scale general computer system independently developed by Aliyun. Look here. Every cup of coffee sold is an advertisement.

On the wall of the coffee shop is the memorabilia of Apsara.

3. Implant programmer-related gamification content in the store. For example, set up a programmer challenge board, programmers can write questions on it, other programmers can connect the code, and guests who successfully solve the problem can take away a custom coffee cup.

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

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

Totoro believes that Aliyun's purpose of opening a coffee shop is to attract vertical programmers through the medium of coffee, and the main users of the Aliyun brand are these programmers, so they have emotional interaction with users through the coffee shop. I'm afraid it's Aliyun's real intention to open coffee.

For a brand, if it is not offline in the physical space, give consumers a clear perception and accessibility, consumers' feelings of the brand will not be so intuitive. So the brand display from online to offline, is not just a flow transformation as simple, more often still hope to give the brand a touchable perspective.

Perhaps this is the real intention of Ali Yun. If it were just for the coffee business, Ali Yun would not have gone to so much trouble to open his own coffee shop. We can understand that it would be good to cast a fixed interactive brand media advertisement offline, not to mention that the content can be constantly changing, anyway, it costs a lot of money.

Ding Lei's Yi Jian Cafe: the next strictly selected ambition

For Ding Lei, another Internet mogul, opening a coffee shop is not as simple as an advertisement. After all, every product Ding Lei has done these years is very careful. If you want to do it, of course, it must contain the big dream of Weiyang pig and strict selection.

The coffee shop called Yijian opened its first shop in the Pearl River New Town, the core business district of Guangzhou. Guangzhou is also the place where the dream of NetEase began. As NetEase's first offline physical coffee shop, Yi Jian Cafe is a coffee shop that brings together the attributes of food, social, learning, entertainment and so on.

This obviously looks like more than just a coffee shop.

As a coffee shop, of course, the core product is coffee. According to public information, the coffee products provided by the easy Cafe are mainly high-quality coffee, as well as a wide range of products, including Italian coffee and creative coffee. At the same time, it also provides fruit tea, light meals, desserts and so on.

The quality of coffee is also said to be excellent, and its main coffee is personally supervised and produced by Lim Dong-Won, a world-class coffee master from Taiwan, so it can be regarded as very attentive.

In the design of the whole space, Yi Jian coffee is also an ulterior motive, following NetEase's consistent simplicity and small clear style, the space design is very open, Yi Jian Logo also runs through all the objects.

In short, in the word of mouth of users, it has been rapidly promoted to the new online celebrity coffee shop in Guangzhou, and it is said that it has unwittingly begun to become a fan-prone base.

At present, Yi Jian Cafe has no outstanding innovation differences, but in view of NetEase's entertainment genes, we have reason to believe that NetEase's rich content will run through this coffee shop system. For example, whether NetEase's popular game Onmyoji's IP will be integrated into the offline coffee shop elements in the future is actually something to look forward to.

In my opinion, it is not surprising that NetEase opened a coffee shop, and it can even be said to be a natural thing. Whether it is the hot NetEase strict selection, or the recently financed NetEase Yang Pig, or the original NetYiyun Music, NetEase Open course, NetEase News client, this series of products are all with a touch of idealistic color products, its characteristics, the crowd are around the pursuit of high-quality people's living consumption and layout.

Although NetEase never forcibly opened the connection between these products, and sometimes even deliberately pursued the independent development of their respective products, it did not hinder that under this product temperament, the natural labels among the user groups were consistent, that is, the pursuit of a high quality of life.

In the past, these user interactions were done online, and even content products such as music and clients suddenly had some subtle social attributes, so NetEase's ability to produce capacity and allow users to interact and socialize is first-class.

Coffee shop happens to be such a product with its own media and social attributes, and we have no reason to suspect that NetEase will lead this attribute to the offline format.

Opening a coffee shop at this time is an ideal choice. In the future, this group of users who claim to be easy fans can easily go from online to offline and create connections through the interaction of social elements. With such a carrier, the theme space of music, games and e-commerce elements will be set up naturally.

In this way of thinking, I have no doubt that the future Zhihu, Douban and other quality products, user label convergence of the community, will also be possible to enter the coffee shop such an offline format.

Users also need a more tangible carrier to carry the needs of user interaction. As for whether Zhihu will open his own coffee shop, I think I have to talk to Zhou Yuan. I'm just assuming here.