The coffee brand launched by the whole family wants to rob Starbucks business.

Convenience store coffee is becoming a new coffee market.

It may sound hard to believe, but the whole family's poker coffee is actually aimed at Starbucks-even though Starbucks coffee costs three times as much as the whole family.

After the Spring Festival, the whole family went online on a large number of advertisements for guest coffee. Perhaps the most conspicuous is the humanoid sign outside each family store: the spokesman Chen Yihan holds a cup of guest coffee, a malachite green tweed coat and a sweet smile look lively and lovely.

Photo: Chen Yihan Weibo

They also launched a wave of offline and online publicity, in which Chen Yihan carried a coffee cup-shaped paper-cut through the streets of Shanghai, with the slogan "I met a beautiful cup on the street corner." In online activities, consumers can also take photos and submit their own photos to Chen Yihan's coffee relay event, while participants have prizes such as coffee coupons and round-trip air tickets to Taiwan.

This wave of publicity has worked well, with more than 60 million Weibo readers on the topic, and has also attracted spontaneous contributions from many netizens. In the era of developed social media, taking photos and sharing small details of life with mobile phones is something many people are happy to participate in.

Contributions from netizens

Contributions from netizens

Contributions from netizens

But although it has only recently begun to be publicized on a large scale by spokesmen and social media, Guke Coffee was quietly launched as early as June last year. "in the past six months, we have been doing internal testing, taste improvement and shop assistant training," Ben, head of public affairs at Dingxin Group, who is in charge of the whole family brand, told the interface. Wait until the basic layout is ready, take advantage of the Spring Festival to come back, the weather is still cold, officially launch the whole family guest coffee brand. "

More than half a year of internal testing time is not short. But it's not easy to make coffee. In addition to the need to consider coffee consumption around convenience stores, the standardization of taste is particularly important, especially for convenience store coffee that is cheaper and emphasizes freshly ground. You may have had the experience that even if you buy coffee at the same convenience store, the proportion of lattes you drink varies from day to day, while Starbucks, a professional coffee chain, is much better at standardization.

The goal of the whole family is Starbucks. In the interview, they stressed that the customers used "Guatemalan Arabica coffee beans of very good quality." At the same time, they hope to impress original Starbucks consumers with freshly ground coffee in convenience stores with lower prices and better quality.

It sounds difficult, but after all, not everyone cares about the difference between convenience store coffee and Starbucks, and convenience store coffee is much cheaper. So how to increase the added value of the whole family's brand is the first thing they need to consider-or let the urban white-collar workers who are carrying Starbucks into the office building are willing to replace their coffee paper cups with those of the whole family.

So "meeting every cup of beauty in life" became the focus of the whole family coffee promotion. "what we want to bring to consumers is the warm little details of life, a kind of affection," Ben said. The convenience store, which is full of temperature, emphasizes that the feelings are natural and cordial.

The same is true in Taiwan, where the whole family is trying to build the concept of "buying coffee for the whole family = loving life." Earlier this year, McCann Taiwan launched an interactive promotion of "100 wonderful clues" for family coffee: red rain shoes, awkward ex-boyfriends, perfumes with Prague memories, and hated empty seats in charge. They shot 100 small details, but also invited consumers to film the beautiful details of their lives to participate in the contribution, and finally gathered to form a short advertising film.

The whole family in Taiwan-100 beautiful clues

The whole family in Taiwan-100 beautiful clues

Nowadays, Chinese consumers have an increasing demand for freshly ground coffee. Although China's freshly ground coffee market share was only 2% in 2016, it has grown by an average of more than 20% in recent years, according to Euromonitor International. In more mature coffee consumer markets such as Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States, the market share of ground coffee is more than 25%, and 91% in the United States.

The outbreak of China's coffee market has also brought more competition in different prices: for example, in first-tier cities like Shanghai, except for Starbucks with standardized chains with an average price of about 30 yuan, boutique coffee shops that are slightly more expensive and pursue differentiation in coffee quality and store decoration, today's convenience store coffee market of less than 20 yuan can not be ignored-the convenience store itself has a large customer base. At the same time, the relative price is lower and faster, which brings a large group of potential consumers.

But the competition for coffee in convenience stores is already fierce. Convenience stores such as 7-11, Rosen and Histo all have their own coffee, and the food official account Penguin eating and drinking Guide also made a test detailing the characteristics, pros and cons of coffee in different convenience stores in Shanghai-and concluded that, for many people, the raw materials and coffee categories of each convenience store are not much different. Maybe the whole family latte is better than the 7-11 latte, but you don't give up the 7-11 downstairs for a cup of latte and go to the whole family two roads away to buy coffee.

Photo Source: Penguin eating and drinking Guide

So before thinking about how to target Starbucks, the first thing you need to do is to get rid of the homogenization of convenience store coffee. The "premium card" launched in the second half of last year is an attempt aimed at the mainland market: unlike ordinary family sharing cards, premium cards that need to pay a certain annual fee provide more benefits for people, such as more points for buying coffee, daily shopping promotion, coffee collection, and so on. Recently, they also launched an e-commerce App, which is only aimed at premium card members, mostly imported goods and relatively low prices-both coffee spots and discounts for premium card members are designed to enhance consumer stickiness and differentiate them from other convenience stores.

At least for now, none of the other convenience stores have begun to promote their coffee brands on a large scale, and the whole family is the first. For young people who rush to buy a cup of coffee at a convenience store and bring it to the office before going to work, people may have no idea of "Guatemalan Arabica coffee beans" and do not care whether the store uses flavored or Meiji milk, in addition to convenience, emotional connection and intimacy may be more important.