Chapter 3. Brain Feed: Blue bottle coffee - AMORE STORIES - ENGLISH
#Baik Soubinne
2017.06.07
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Chapter 3. Brain Feed: Blue bottle coffee

Columns written by member of Amorepacific Group

ColumnistBaik Soubinne
Amorepacific Digital & CI Design Team


 Last time I talked about a big company that has made good use of its service design. This time, I'm looking at Blue Bottle Coffee, which is an example of a relatively small business using service design. Starbucks is the most widely consumed coffee in the US and maybe even the world, but Blue Bottle Coffee is the one that has set the third-generation coffee trend. Many people perceive Blue Bottle Coffee as 'hip coffee,' and the brand has achieved rapid growth despite the price hurdle in the supersaturated coffee market all thanks to the company's experience design.

 The key to Blue Bottle Coffee is providing fresh high-end coffee. The witty brand overview posted on the Blue Bottle Coffee website presents its most important 'Core promise and vow':
  • Use only fresh beans that are chosen with care
    Properly roast only 6 pounds as the designated amount per day
    Brew coffee only within 48 hours of roasting

 The three firm beliefs listed above can be readily understood by all and create a clear sense of expectation that drinking blue coffee means drinking fresh coffee. But, just being able to have fresh coffee is not a unique perspective capable of completely differentiating the brand from other, more prominent coffee brands.

 The first coffee ever sold by Blue Bottle Coffee was actually a holistic service. Coffeeholic Kolshitsky is the person who thought up the business structure with 'how to provide customers with coffee that has the greatest taste.' That's why the first method he adopted in the early days of Blue Bottle Coffee was to have conversations with customers who had bought the coffee and determine their taste, preference and frequency of drinking coffee, after which he delivered a customized drip coffee to their front doors. One thing to note here is that the company somewhat touched upon the significance of drinking coffee in these people's lives, in addition to the taste of coffee itself. Heavy drinkers cannot make drip coffee by hand five times a day, and people who start their day with a certain coffee like a ritual may consider the process of drinking coffee important in its own way. In other words, it is only meaningful to provide coffee in a way that suits the customer experience. In this context, the high-end coffee service pursued by Blue Bottle Coffee definitely secured quality as the core factor, and then sold coffee that perfectly fits the taste of each individual customer. This clearly differentiates it from other coffee shops. However, this kind of selling method is only suitable when a small company provides services for a small number of people; it's not easily scalable to a company that aspires to become a big business.

 Blue Bottle had to design a new service for the gradually expanding business, while also sustaining the idea to provide the high-end coffee they had defined. There are three cores of the design: Creating contents with information that is important for customers, providing coffee in a method that is convenient for customers, and letting customers know about the pleasure of enjoying coffee.

1. Conveying clear information for new customers

 The case that clearly displays the brand's determination to provide customer-oriented high-end coffee services can be found in the renewal of the Blue Bottle Coffee website. The most remarkable change in the website renewal of Blue Bottle Coffee in 2013 was in the way they described their products. Most other high-end coffee brands mostly emphasized the products' origins or displayed the ratings of the coffee beans that they used. The coffee culture is as exclusive as wine, and thus people can only enjoy high-quality coffee that suits their taste only if they are well aware of 'the language' and expressions of coffee experts. But, Blue Bottle Coffee's website is different.
 You can easily see from the image above that Blue Bottle Coffee's website makes it easy for you to choose the right coffee that suits your taste without having to study the coffee's complicated "origin story" or different coffee beans. The page briefly lists simple expressions about each type of coffee taste, as well as suitable brewing methods for the coffee bean, and which tool to use so that you can make purchases compatible with your own coffee machine at home. The brand assumed that customers are best aware of their favorite coffee. Thus, as long as there are detailed adjectives about the coffee flavor and the coffee brewing methods that match well, customers can buy coffee that is just right for their taste and style. It seems that Blue Bottle is making efforts behind the scenes to come up with the best coffee quality, without forcing you to study, so all you need to do is choose your favorite flavor and method to brew coffee, right? The company cannot provide tailor-made coffee for each and every customer as it had done in the earlier days, but it still seems like a trivial, yet meticulous idea for selling coffee: that customers can actually choose for themselves according to their taste. It's actually a really simple method, revealing all the information that customers would want to know, rather than the information that the company wants to tell them. But, not many brands are doing that. This is because it's easy for the narrator to just say what they want, instead of saying what the other party wants to hear.

2. Change in the touchpoint for the new era

 You can feel from the products on offer that this coffee is completely different from what you had in the past, but you can also feel it from the service when purchasing the coffee. The goal of Blue Bottle Coffee, also referred to as the coffee of the Silicon Valley, was to provide great coffee right to the door of each customer, and thus the company pondered the best way to sell coffee.

 Most coffee businesses struggle to find the best spot to sell their products as a method to expand the touchpoint with customers. This method is easily adopted by big companies with large-scale capital investments. They actively use the infrastructure and investment they already have, flooding the market with their products in places that are easily seen by customers. In this situation, small companies can secure a competitive edge at a much lower cost by using web-based services. TONX is a coffee brand that has made best use of this. TONX has established a regular purchasing service for Blue Bottle Coffee. To better understand their services, let's take a look at a promotional event they came up.
 TONX was a coffee subscription service provider of regular online purchases of coffee. In 2014 it held a promotional event that provided full-on resistance to Starbucks coffee. The promotion involved paying for a high-quality coffee subscription service of TONX with the Starbucks gift card. The company's ambition was to aggressively attract Starbucks's customers. While this was interesting in itself, TONX went further, even bluntly comparing the prices of fresh coffee delivered to the front door with the prices of Starbucks coffee, emphasizing the appeal of its coffee delivery service. Significantly impressed by this service, Blue Bottle acquired TONX to provide the same service. The coffee subscription service that provides the coffee of each customer's taste in a cycle whereby each customer wants was the perfect solution for the foundation purpose of Blue Bottle, rather than rapidly increasing the number of stores. This clearly shows how Blue Bottle Coffee, which makes careful decisions about opening stores, wants to interact with its customers, unlike Starbucks, which you can probably see at every corner. For young customers who have experience making a few venture investments, this subscription model resembles the concept of constantly investing in the business, which has only made it all the more popular. In fact, providing coffee through such online subscription is particularly effective for increasing the brand's profits, as there are labor costs, which take up the biggest part of expenses in store.

3. The difficulty of pleasure and the pleasure of difficulty in finding the taste of customers

 Finally, let me tell you about the Blue Bottle's approach to increasing the value of the customer experience when selling coffee. Once a customer enters a Blue Bottle store, the most symbolic things they notice are the tools for drip coffee lined up. As you watch each drop of coffee falling before your eyes, you think that this really shows the freshness that's emphasized by Blue Bottle Coffee. Watching the droplets of coffee filling up the cup, you feel a certain sense of visual and olfactory satisfaction. You can easily track every move of a barista on the other side of the counter, which was the CEO's intention for customers to see as much as possible how coffee is made. As you watch each step with interest, you naturally begin to anticipate the taste of coffee. It's a dramatic tool to maximize the appeal of the coffee cup that's in front of you, freshly brewed from carefully selected coffee beans with perfect timing.

 Coffee is like an item of personal preference. I like this term, because the definition of food that's chosen just because of its flavor and taste instead of having to be an energy source gives a certain purpose to the food, which is to purely offer 'pleasure.' Blue Bottle probably used such dramatic tools in the stores to focus on the pleasure of drinking coffee in order to fulfill the original purpose of coffee. Furthermore, Blue Bottle offers training in three routes about ways to brew coffee in order to convey pleasure in the process of drinking coffee.
 The service that you can most easily encounter is the LEARN page on the website. There is the LEARN page button on the upper tab, which presents brewing guides to enjoy delicious coffee using each tool. Not only customers using the subscription service, but also customers who bought Blue Bottle Coffee overseas can search recipes to make coffee that's just as good as the one you drink at the stores.
 There are also free classes at offline stores for those who want to learn more about coffee. The free classes teach you how to brew Blue Bottle's signature coffee. The classes are open on many days, so all you have to do is register at the store you want on a day you want, and you'll be able to receive training from a professional barista. Offering this class for free seems to be a sort of determination to spread the coffee culture. If many people get more interested in the culture of making coffee, customers will no longer just pay for the coffee they drink, but may become a whole community to enjoy the coffee culture along with Blue Bottle Coffee, which will increase brand loyalty and the lifespan of the brand itself.

 Finally, the brand also provides online classes on specialized courses for Blue Bottle baristas by collaborating with an education service called Skillshare. Blue Bottle is spreading the coffee culture with offline services, so it's polishing up on its brand expertise with online pre-paid training classes. Some of you may not have heard about Skillshare, so let me briefly explain. Skillshare is a 5-year-old learning platform with online classes, offering educational contents from real field experts. On Skillshare, Blue Bottle Coffee created an online lecture by Michael Phillips, World Barista Champion who is in charge of training the company's baristas. The course consists of 10 one-hour classes, offering substantial contents and useful tips for people who want to become a barista.
 The takeout cup of Blue Bottle Coffee, the symbol of high-end coffee in the US, is made from training services to lead coffee culture, aggressive marketing to embrace more people as coffee consumers, and efforts to create optimized online and offline services using digital media. Led by this small business that created a 'third wave' of coffee, the specialty coffee market has achieved a remarkable growth worth $26 billion today. Many people predict that differentiated customer-oriented services anticipated from small businesses will be one way to survive in the high-end coffee market amid such fierce competition. The scope of the service is not limited to one thing, but can include a variety of things such as delivery, packaging method, or building a store environment for customers to more conveniently purchase products in combination with technologies like the Nespresso store in Paris. But, today, I focused on the case of service design, which only comes through with the integration of online and offline media, since my department has been changed into the Digital & CI Team. I hope this has been a good chance for you to see Blue Bottle Coffee's success from a new perspective, and I look forward to meeting you again next time.

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