Coffee shop operation sharing international chain coffee shop diffuse coffee

Coffee shop: on the whole, the coffee shop is not a very good business, facing a series of problems, such as high initial investment, high fixed costs, poor capital turnover efficiency, low growth rate, easy to reach the upper limit, fierce competition and so on. However, in Zhongguancun, where the population density is high, the floating population is large, and white-collar students gather, it can be said that the rigid demand is second only to hotels, which inevitably attracts countless heroes to bend over. What's more, as the ultimate ideal of many young people who have little employment value, there are plenty of people who are willing to spend money or be bought as a boss.

After Starbucks entered China, many people thought they would kill other brands of small coffee shops as they did in the United States, but in fact, on the contrary, all kinds of coffee shops sprang up like bamboo shoots after a spring rain. To put it simply, even without taking into account geographical differences, the personalities and needs of Chinese consumers are far more diverse than Americans, and they attach more importance to experience and process than efficiency and results, unless the cost leader has a monopoly-level advantage. it is difficult to be dominant in the Chinese market. To sum up, the Chinese market for consumer products, compared with the United States, can accommodate more brands. Whether it's coffee shop, restaurant, mobile phone, car or clothing, etc. This is a very good thing, giving countless entrepreneurs from scratch a chance to get a piece of the pie.

[selling coffee or environment]

Lattes worth 28 yuan a cup used to be very expensive, but at that time a bowl of meat noodles was only 5 yuan. When I sat down for a cup of coffee at Starbucks and could barely count the pretence, when I sat there reading and making appointments with friends, I occasionally thought, "it's really hard for this small broken bench and small round table to sit for a long time. Can't there be a comfortable Okay with an elegant seat, unlike the coffee shop of so many shouting poker uncles on the island? why is Starbucks so famous? why is it so low-grade decoration?"

After going to the United States, I saw a lot of Starbucks that didn't even have seats. I gradually realized that although founder Schultz's dream was to make it a third space outside his home and company, in the United States, where coffee is a necessity, Starbucks' social attributes are far from being compared with those at home. More importantly, it provides a standardized medium-and high-quality necessities of life. To save the trouble of deciding whether the coffee in an unknown store is hygienic and delicious, how many American cars stop at the door and buy coffee and turn away. The huge sales of each Starbucks has little to do with the number of tables and chairs in its store. Location is the first attribute that contributes to profits, and the environment is not the most important thing. I just need to find the nearest place to buy a cup of iced American coffee. Starbucks in the United States has a small turnover per order, but the turnover rate is extremely high (many stores do not have one at all), which is essentially different from Chinese coffee shops.

Until today, it is very difficult for Starbucks to pretend in big cities such as Beijing. 28 yuan can't even eat two bowls of meat noodles, but the nature of coffee shops is still social first. most Chinese people go to coffee shops to find a place where they can kill time, whether they are themselves or with friends, rather than Guo Jingming's people who drink Starbucks without takeout every day. So in essence, coffee shops after Starbucks in China are basically more comfortable than Starbucks, and few stools dare to be as small and hard as Starbucks (with the exception of Costa, of course, it can only be opened in shopping malls). Remember, at least for a long time, the environment of Chinese coffee shops is much more important than the taste of beverages. It is the purest social place. Chinese people can ride for an hour and queue in front of a dilapidated fly restaurant for another hour in order to eat the authentic Fish Filets in Hot Chili Oil. They will not do such a thing to taste a unique taste of coffee, Kopi Luwak is also useless.

[why is coffee so popular?]

The year before last, Man Coffee has risen rapidly in Beijing and become the leader of the new generation of coffee shops. Losers are rich and handsome, and almost every one I have been to is full. Gorgeous decoration, comfortable chairs, warm lights, plain iced American coffee, isn't that what my ideal coffee shop looked like when I was sitting on a bench at Starbucks? From its layout and decoration, it is simply for social life, friends get together, couples dating, white-collar overtime, students self-study, all can be satisfied. It does not need to be driven in expensive shopping malls without affecting passenger flow. People will take the subway or drive to find it. It needs a larger area to accommodate more customers to improve profits. "go and have coffee for a while" has become a thing to do in the afternoon after dinner. Starbucks, on the other hand, is becoming a coffee store. You can see more and more people walking down the street with Starbucks paper cups in their hands, but very few people will order takeout coffee. Of course, this is not to say that Starbucks has been completely defeated. On the contrary, its overall profitability may not be much worse than before, but it has gradually changed from selling "lifestyle" and "social places" to purely selling coffee brands. In just a few years, with not-so-delicious coffee, it easily snatched countless territories from seemingly invincible Americans.

Obviously, the success of Man Coffee is a complete value chain, it contains a lot of exquisite details, we analyze it from a specific point. For example, in the traditional problem of the catering industry, what if the environment is too comfortable and some thick-skinned people like me order the cheapest food? The environment of many McDonald's in the center of the United States is not much better than that of public toilets, and 25-minute signs are posted on the doorway to increase the turnover rate. McDonald's Pizza Hut in the United States is a restaurant that purely sells products, and the sales of DriveThrough, which can pass by in the vast rural areas, are always several times higher than those in empty restaurants. Diffuse coffee is mainly sold in social places, and even though its strawberry muffins taste good, it is not bacon cakes, pig's feet and chicken legs. If a coffee shop is full, most customers will choose to wait for a seat or leave. Obviously, this is not a problem that can be solved perfectly. Obviously, you can't drive people away as domineering as McDonald's. You can only try to solve it through details. You see, Diaoye brisket decoration is so exquisite, bowls and seasoning salts are made so cleverly, the stool is still very uncomfortable, if all replaced by a back sofa, with unlimited side dishes and tea, not only the turning rate will be directly affected, guests waiting in line for too long will cause impatience and even anger will affect the image of the brand.

As mentioned above, Man Coffee can hardly be opened in the mall, and the location it chooses is relatively convenient, with parking spaces, usually at least two floors, and smoking, which is several times the size of Starbucks. For example, in Jinyuan Lufthansa Business District, which is close to me, Starbucks is in the mall, while Man Coffee is in a residential building two blocks away, with an area of at least 4 Starbucks. Secondly, the spatial layout of the coffee is very reasonable. I am a layman in interior design, but I am sure that its layout and the size of tables and chairs are carefully designed, single, double and six tables, and most of the single tables can be reassembled. A long plate against the wall can sit in a row of self-study losers, compared with many stupid hotel coffee shops where all the tables are four tables and one guest is not embarrassed to share the table with four people. The utilization rate of space is extremely high. After all, the bottom line of a coffee shop opened by a normal person can only recommend changing seats for guests who do not leave.

Third, it is also the most powerful point of diffuse coffee, so powerful that it should be written under a separate subtitle. I said it was an environmental coffee shop, but it actually made money by selling muffins and smoothies. When we go to places like Starbucks and Costa, we usually only order a cup of coffee and add at most a cake, but we can get a quick coffee trip. Boy, it's often more money than lunch. Except for about 30 cups of coffee, more than 50 smoothies and 80 muffins, the variable cost is only a few yuan, but the exquisite food model is dangling in front of your eyes when you order coffee. The impact of a silly menu can be hundreds of times stronger, but at a table with more than two people, there are very few people who order only two cups of coffee, either a muffin or a fruit salad, and more men and women come together. Per capita consumption has changed from more than 20 to more than 50, with a large area, high attendance and high price per order.

You may not care, because all the coffee shops in China except Starbucks Costa seem to have kitchens, not to mention muffins and smoothies. Relatives' original coffee shop can cook even New York steak! The kitchen of diffuse coffee is very simple. It can only make a muffin smoothie sandwich salad, which Americans can make. First of all, the operating cost of purchasing is much less than that of those coffee shops that need to open fire to fry steak. Moreover, its food can be easily eaten with coffee. Whether you have had dinner or are going to dinner later, ordering an extra smoothie or fruit will not disturb your rhythm. If you have to eat here, there are sandwiches and salads. And no matter how good the New York steak in a coffee shop is, how many times a month can it be ordered? Everything on the coffee menu can be learned by training anyone in the afternoon, while a relative's coffee shop unexpectedly needs to hire a western food chef with a monthly salary of up to four waiters, just for a complete all-inclusive menu. Less is more, all the food of diffuse coffee can be put out in a display case. At present, I do not know how many township entrepreneurs are still unable to understand. As a coffee shop or a small restaurant, a menu of dozens of pages not only increases its own operating costs but also causes choice phobia to consumers. It doesn't help to increase turnover.

There are many other details that will not be detailed here, such as the bear given when ordering, the ice water you get, and the iMac that can surf the Internet, which may not be a good idea. For example, its muffins are not bad, but if you sell 50 yuan coffee muffins next to pancake sellers on the street, no wonder you can sell them. Of course, the form of ordering for bears at the counter can not be used in seafood restaurants. But in diffuse coffee, they are interdependent and form a complete and unique value chain.

Why do many small coffee shops that feel good close down one after another?

After staying for a long time, I often think of the coffee shop that lost half of my relatives' life savings. In these seemingly low-threshold industries, many people can do well with a fresh or temporary lack of competition without any theoretical basis. But the lack of basic common sense is doomed not to go too far, not to mention the competition of experts who are good at theory and practice. I really don't know how to die. The relative's shop was still puzzled long after it was closed. He felt that he was almost or even better than going to the island. How could he not do it? finally, he summed up two reasons for several years: 1. I'm not cut out to do business. two。 Bad luck. This seems to be the whole reason why township entrepreneurs fail every time. Reminds me of another group of people around me, do not understand technical analysis, do not study the economic cycle, gold dollar US debt crude oil QE basic correlation knows nothing, no stop loss, what, stock speculation actually lost money? Oh yeah? When they leave the market sadly, they usually come to the same conclusion: 1. I am not the material to speculate in stocks. 2. Bad luck.

The fatal problem of the closure of small coffee shops may first appear in operation, which is not the focus of this article, but just a brief summary. Many nouveau riche coffee shop owners or little girls who realize their dreams in life are novices who have not done too many high-cost and low-profit industries, are blindly optimistic, eager for perfection, and lack the most basic concepts of fixed costs and cash flow. The reason why many people are very excited about opening a coffee shop is that a cup of coffee costs 28 yuan and costs only 2 yuan. As a social place to sell the environment, even if the gross profit margin of drinks is 100%, rent, salary, water, electricity, inventory, maintenance, maintenance, exorbitant taxes and miscellaneous taxes can easily make you live beyond your means. Secondly, many people only consider the initial investment before opening a shop, and have no idea about WorkingCapital. After opening a coffee shop, they found that the cash flow is negative every month, and they need a lot of cash for blood transfusion. the longer they work, the more compensation they will indemnify, and the capital chain will be broken before the cash flow becomes positive. Now I understand why in school, entrepreneurship majors must go to finance and accounting majors (marketing majors do not need this), the school is really well-intentioned. Cost control and operational efficiency are the necessary qualities of any entrepreneur, mainly used to save life (if you really want to attack the city, you still have to rely on marketing).

As mentioned earlier, a series of exquisite details of diffuse coffee make people feel comfortable, and the direct feelings they give you are specific, such as comfortable seats, decoration, free ice water, fresh fruit, etc., and the sculptor will tell you, they combine to form a unique value chain that is difficult to separate. This unique value chain makes you fall in love for a long time, and a whole concept comes to mind when you think of coffee, which is its ultimate goal! Capture your brain, seize your mind.

[positioning]

I still have a lot to write about positioning in the future. I would like to simply mention that positioning is the most influential theory in modern marketing because it makes full use of the physiological characteristics or defects of the human brain. In the past two years, in order to save money, I mistakenly entered the speculative market, and in order to study why people buy and sell securities at a specific price, I did some homework in neurology and evolutionary psychology. I found that the human instinctive lack of sense of security, resistance to randomness, looking for paths, self-justification and other characteristics coincide with the starting point of Trout's "positioning".

Our minds are much more stupid than we thought, especially in today's information explosion, there are too many new categories, and there are less and less things to hold under each category. And since Man Coffee snatched the mental resources of "going out for a cup of coffee" from Starbucks with its obvious environmental advantages, the value chain, armed with countless details, has firmly occupied the minds of consumers. Nothing to find a place to sit, or go out to read a book, the coffee will quickly appear in your mind, you may appear in front of wooden seats, purple bears, strawberry muffins, and then unconsciously walked towards the recent coffee. If you are really a coffee lover, or if you occasionally need a cup of iced American coffee like me, you may still want to look for the nearest Starbucks, which is the guarantee of the taste of high-quality coffee. But if it is "find a place to sit and chat with friends", then the coffee will be the first to jump out.

In terms of the general pattern of today's coffee shop market, Starbucks is responsible for selling coffee and diffuse coffee is responsible for selling social venues.

It is not the market that determines the minds of consumers, but the minds of consumers that determine the market. If you have begun to think about brand building from the subtle psychological activities of consumers when making choices, you will surpass most township entrepreneurs in marketing.

Why do many small coffee shops that feel good close down one after another (marketing article)?

As mentioned earlier, the operation is good enough to save one's life. In such a fiercely competitive industry, coffee shops still have to focus on marketing if they want to do well. But the strategic height of the vast majority of coffee shops is only to imitate the tactics of other winners, without any unified thinking to lead. When it comes to relatives' coffee shops, in fact, I have been to a few times. The environment is much better than Starbucks. The steak tastes good, and the fried rice is not bad. Coffee has not only large cups of iced American coffee, but also European-style coffee cups with trays and spoons. Here we can play poker, surf the Internet, have benches, sofas and rocking chairs. It's beautiful to eat two plates of squid rings on the rocking chair. Now, in retrospect, this coffee shop is a microcosm of many low-threshold industries in China. It spends money generously and covers all aspects. It is entirely based on its own subjective feelings. I think I need to have everything I should have. I don't want to give up any customer group. On the other hand, they know nothing about the true operation of consumers' brains, and their thinking only stays in: when I get things done, people naturally come.

If you can insist on seeing now, you should at least understand why most small coffee shops are bound to fail in the fierce competition. For example, relatives' stores, from the details, seem to be good, but put together, it can not form a complete enough to occupy a clear position in the minds of consumers! It seems to be everything, and it seems to be nothing. When I think of it, my brain is so blurred that it is difficult to distinguish it from other coffee shops in a few words, let alone customers who occasionally pass by once or twice. The intelligence of consumers is so low that people love and hate them. No matter how good you are at all kinds of martial arts, he can't think of any of them. In an industry that competes by differentiation, "almost" equals death.

Now we are looking back at Man Coffee, as I said earlier, Man Coffee is typically won by details, but unlike most places, every detail of it does not come out of thin air, but serves for a distinct central idea! This central idea is its positioning: to create a social place that belongs to young people, with an elegant environment and an atmosphere of literature and art, where you can sit with friends all afternoon. Its lights, its bears, its dishes, its decoration, its wooden tables and chairs, all try to leave a distinct impression in your mind and occupy the coffee shop that is the best place to sit and kill time in your mind. This is the secret of the value chain, every link in the chain, for a common value proposition, in order to create a common positioning.

You have to figure out what position you want to occupy in the minds of consumers, and then strengthen this positioning with as much detail as possible to create a value chain that only belongs to this particular position.

Is coffee really invincible?

In view of the dullness of the human brain, a successful positioning can firmly occupy the mental resources of many consumers for many years, such as the accidental incident in which diffuse coffee squeezed Starbucks from the minds of consumers from selling lifestyle to selling take-away coffee. It is based on accumulated strength, and the environmental advantage is too obvious (of course, Starbucks relies on the advantages of the product itself, and may not care about the transformation. If one day in China can become like in the United States do not even want a stool may be more profitable), the timing is excellent, too early for Chinese people to go to the coffee shop to sit and chat habits. But those newcomers still want to challenge the status of coffee in the same position, it is even more difficult. For example, we mentioned that the details of diffuse coffee must be a complete chain and cannot be imitated alone, so the rich local boss simply stamped his foot and copied it all. overnight there are coffee shops with retro decorations and cracked tables selling muffins and smoothies. For example, there is an ESSECoffee in Haidian Book City, which decided to take the copycat to the end and replace the bear with a hat. The others are almost exactly the same, taking advantage of the geographical location, and the business looks OK (the actual profitability is unknown because the rent at that location is really scary). Caffebene, which is also from South Korea (Man Coffee is actually a copycat version of it), is basically the same thing, the price is more expensive than Man Coffee, but the business is far worse. The first-come-first-come principle can only be applied when stupid consumers make a choice. These newcomers, like McCam and Dexter, may be able to make some money when there is no KFC or McDonald's nearby, but when the latter bloom everywhere, the former can only close their eyes and wait to die.

The power of positioning is so terrible!

So is Man Coffee really invincible? if I run a coffee shop now, I can only watch it go bankrupt? According to the idea of Man Coffee's victory over Starbucks at that time, it is already very difficult to completely subvert the existing position of diffuse Coffee in people's minds. It is impossible to move the decoration of Ritz Carlton, which is as large as diffuse Coffee, with a per capita consumption of 50%. The strong interconnection of the value chain is that, according to its mature positioning and the current consumer group, diffuse coffee has found an excellent balance between price and quality. The larger the scale, the cost-leading advantage will gradually emerge. Unless you have a lot of money and money to lose money, at this stage, if you want to re-create a brand that is exactly the same as the quality and price of coffee, the cost of purchasing and decoration management will suffer a big loss compared with the competitors in nearly 100 stores.

Why starting a business is so difficult most of the time is not because no one can do anything from your competitors, but because the lazy and stubborn minds of consumers are firmly occupied by these existing cunning bosses. What dandruff Head & Shoulders, receiving gifts only accept brain platinum, Quanjude Roast Duck, pretending to be iPhone, Afu is essential oil, and so on. How can a man like Diao Ye write such a simple and rough copywriting? his ambition is to thoroughly link all the categories related to essential oils in your brain to Ah Fu, and it seems to have been realized. But it's a bit of a brag to insist that cosmetics is Ah Fu. In short, Afu is the essential oil is fake, the essential oil is Afu is true! This is the naked land grab, who first grabs the mental resources of consumers, who will grab the market share.

So young friends, if the product can't be made, don't tearfully say to everyone that my stuff is excellent, but consumers are so stupid. Unless you make rockets or airplanes or crude oil and coal, where enterprises that need differentiation to survive, the crueler than the market is the lazy hearts of customers. Always keep in mind that positioning is this, attack is the first, is the only way out. Fortunately, although the human brain is slow, the capacity of a single directory is extremely limited, but it can hold many new directories.

In my opinion, this is the essence of today's positioning theory, especially for new entrepreneurs, it doesn't matter if they can't beat the existing leaders. Let's skillfully design, develop consumers' minds and enlighten their lives. Develop a new battlefield on your own.