In it Henry describes how in times of Recession (ouch I used the R word-more on that in my next post) we must look to attract more affluent customers. He describes how in the past a cup of coffee was just a cup of coffee and now it comes with more bells and whistles than a mercedes, americano, latte, skinny latte, vanilla, caramel, syrup, douoble shot, foam, cinnamon sprinkles.......
This goes some way to explaining the $2.50 price tag on a cup of coffee costing 25c to make.
The profit on the double shot of coffee far exceeds the profit on the coffee itself. The deisgner handbag costing $3,000 does not in fact cost 200 times more to manufacture than the similar looking but non diesigner handbag sold for $15.
But of course this is not the full story when we go to Starbucks we do so not just for the coffee, we go for the "experience". Starbucks describes itself as being the ‘third-place of
business’ – home, office, Starbucks in between.
If you walked up to someone about to buy a bag of ground coffee at the store and tried to sell them just a cup for $2.50, they would tell you it was too expensive when the bag of coffee costs $3.00.
But, if you are at the coffeehouse, you are going to pay for the experience.
Henry concludes that in difficult recessionary times we must
- separate price from what we sell
- deliberately look for affluent customers and
- serve them with an experience
In my view three great aims for any business not just in difficult times but all the time. I particularly like 3, because ultimately we buy on emotion, we return to stores / businesses where we have a good emotional experience.
This was brought home to me again over the past week.
We use an online recruitment board called salesjobs.ie as a part of our recruitment process when we recruit.
We find it excellent if used correctly (refreshing the ads, browsing the online cvs, e mailing potential candidates etc. etc. and of course systemising this and doing it every day), but back to the point, Emma the sales consulatant from Sales Jobs called me on a number of occasions over the past few months to ask if we had any recruitment coming up, very pleasantly, not pushy (she clearly understands the concept that the customer will buy when the customer is ready to buy not when she is ready to sell), she built that relationship brick by brick step by step and when we were ready to recruit the first e mail I sent was to Emma who called me immediately to process the sale.
She had built an emotional bond with me, my previous experiences buying from salesjobs has always been good and so I returned for more of the same.
No comments:
Post a Comment