Caffeinate Your Customers
Coffee is a marketer’s best friend
When you need to grow sales, it’s also your customers’ best friend. Caffeinate your marketing to give sales a lift.
In Finland, every business meeting begins with coffee. My coworkers in Finland helped me learn to respect and appreciate their opening ritual — all coffee, no talk about business.
Admittedly, that’s hard for an American to imagine.
As anyone who’s ever worked with me knows: I love coffee, anyway I can get it.
- Drip? Yep.
- Espresso? Yesso.
- I’d love a latte.
- Impress me with your French press. It brews the strongest coffee of all.
Coffee leads to a longer life
Lucky for coffee drinkers, coffee keeps you going. It literally keeps you alive. Coffee drinkers are 16% to 21% less likely to die than non-coffee drinkers, a recent British study found.
All by itself, that’s a good reason to caffeinate your marketing team.
Coffee improves alertness, memory, and mental function. All pretty handy for marketers on deadlines.
You are on deadline today, right?
Do these superpowers come from caffeine alone? Or from one of the 1,000 other botanical compounds found in coffee? It will take many more scientific studies to be sure.
Recently, marketers got even better news from scientists about coffee. Coffee has the power to caffeinate your marketing and transform your customers’ buying behaviors.
In a store, coffee-drinking customers spend more!
That’s why more retailers want to open a little coffee shop inside the front door, like the one at Eataly in Manhattan, where this Lavazza ad is the star.
When customers drink coffee before shopping, they spend more, a new study in the Journal of Marketing found. Shoppers who drank a free cup of coffee before they entered a store spent about 50% more than their non-caffeinated counterparts.
Researchers from the University of South Florida tested this hypothesis at a home goods store in France and a department store in Spain. Not only did consumers buy more, but they also bought more things they didn’t need, like scented candles.
Marketing professor Dipayan Biswas says that caffeine releases dopamine in the brain, increases energy, boosts impulsivity, and cuts self-control. The result for consumers: higher spending.
Since consumer spending powers two-thirds of the U.S. economy, maybe what your customers need from marketing is a cup of coffee.
How can you put this lesson to work for your brand? I’d love to hear your ideas.
For more on the health benefits of coffee, see this content from the Cleveland Clinic.
So have a cup of coffee, live longer and sell more!
For more on marketing, here’s “How to keep your content marketing always on message.”
