As s i g nme nt

Prepared for: Marketing Management Assignment

Prepared by: Ahmed Mubarik
Date: 3 July 2014
Proposal #: Coffee branding


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Table of Contents
1. Introduction .............................................................................................................................. 3
2. Choosing brand elements ..................................................................................................... 3
3. Designing holistic marketing activities........................................................................... 6
Internal Marketing ...................................................................................................................................... 6
Integrated Marketing ................................................................................................................................. 7
Relationship Marketing............................................................................................................................. 7
Socially Responsible Marketing: ........................................................................................................... 8
4. Leveraging secondary association .................................................................................... 8
5. Internal branding ................................................................................................................. 10
6. Brand communities ............................................................................................................. 11
7. Conclusion ............................................................................................................................... 13
8. References ............................................................................................................................... 14

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1. Introduction
The Coffee business environment in the capital city of the Maldives is becoming
competitive. To minimize the competitive pressure, it is important to react quickly to
the changes necessary to strengthen the existence of the business. As a business
development and marketing manager of this medium range coffee shop, this
document discusses some of the important consideration that the company has to
foresee to achieve in the future. The insights discussed include branding elements,
holistic marketing, leveraging secondary association when branding, internal
marketing and importance of building brand community.
The main existing product in our coffee shop is not a single branded coffee, rather we
are selling different brands of coffees that are available to buy locally. The
environmental factors such as customers changing lifestyle and stiff competition
contributes the thinking of new ways to sustain the business in the small city, Male.
We need to raise the question of whether we are getting the maximum profit we can
achieve through our resource or whether there other ways that we can maximize our
profit. Therefore, this document highlights importance of building a good brand for
the coffee shop.

2. Choosing brand elements
Choosing accurate and appropriate brand elements for the organization is critical to
the success of building a good brand. According to Stark (2013) designing a branded
coffee shop involves informing customers about the greatness of the coffee and gives
them a feeling of high value for the money they spent. Therefore brand elements
should be designed in a way that it can tell the story of the greatness of the coffee
shop and give customers a feel-good experience.
The key brand elements to install in the branding of the coffee shop will start from the
Brand Name. As discussed by DeMers (2013), the brand name should address the
audience knowledge of the coffee shop; it should be unique and competitive. Brand
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name should also be short, sweet and easy to pronounce and it should be linguistically
clean. This means that the name we choose should fit to the cultural values and
norms. Some of the famous brand names in the coffee industry include Starbucks
Coffee, Costa Coffee &The Coffee Bean. The product name coffee is mentioned in all
these best coffee shops in the world. Similar trend can be copied and make a localized
name for the coffee shop. Examples of different coffee are shown below.

Secondly Logo is critical to the success of branding the coffee shop. In other words,
logo is the virtual representation of the brand story. As the coffee shop is placed in
Male the logo should be designed by focusing on the lifestyle of the coffee drinkers
or the target market. This logo should be designed in a way that it looks simple and
eye-catchy. It is recommended to hire an artist to make a logo that explains the story
of the coffee shop.
Coffee shop should have a slogan as it summarizes overall value propositions.
Slogan should also have the characteristics of make it short and concise. Positive
words should be used when designing a slogan, as it leads to positive perception about
the brand (Foste, 2001). Further more, slogan should have rhythm, rhyme and have a
ring to it (Smith, 2012).
In the modern business environment Brand tone plays an important role in
establishing a good brand. Basically brand tone means how we are communicating
with the customers. As coffee shops are mainly targeted to youth, company can adopt
a friendly communication with the customers. This means that all the written and
verbal communication that the employees or sales staffs communicate with the
customers should be friendly.
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Lastly, brand consistency one of the important brand elements for a coffee shop.
Every single element of the branding strategy should be consistent in all
communications. Example of a beautifully placed coffee tables matching with coffee
color is shown below.

It will be a wastage of marketing effort and money if all the mentioned above brand
elements for the coffee shop does not follow the guidelines or attributes it should have
in creating those elements. According to Stark (2013) the successful coffee shops
integrate everything brand represents into customer-centered way. It includes great
product, great customer service, smart and efficient operations and powerful identity.
In other words See it, Like it, Buy it approach should adapt when designing the
brand elements.
Before designing the brand elements, top management of the coffee shop needs to
have broad understanding of the company business model, concepts, and future plans
and as well as the external competitive environment (SPR Coffee, 2013). As
mentioned by SPR Coffee (2013), the brand colour should be consistent throughout
the design of the coffee shop and the marketing materials. Also the brand should
address traditional culture and contemporary international trends. Top management of
the coffee shop has to decide whether the brand needs to expand its line of products
offered to customers. Poor brand expansion may result to jeopardies the original
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brand of the coffee shop. Legalizing the brand through trademark protects its values
and uniqueness. The brand company creates should fulfill the legal registration
requirements.

3. Designing holistic marketing activities
To make the marketing successful in the coffee shop business, the organization should
not take marketing as an isolated project of the business. The whole elements of the
business should contribute to the overall goals of the marketing strategy. Holistic
marketing activities involve creating value through internal marketing, integrated
marketing, socially responsible marketing and relationship marketing.

(Kotler & Keller, 2009).
Internal Marketing
Internal marketing involves motivating all employees to satisfy customers with value
creation (Kotler & Keller, 2009). All the departments in the organisation has to work
as a team to deliver greater value to the customers. With an agresive training program,
the employees themselves can be educated to consider as customers of the supporting
departments. For example, purchasing department of the coffee and other varieties to
produce products in the coffee should consider coffee shop kitchen staffs are their
customers. Likewise, kitchen staffs should consider sales staffs as their customers.
Jointly all the business activities should design to deliver great services to each other.
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End result would be a great consumer satifaction. Internal marketing program could
be successful if it can allign issues with organisational culture and job satisfaction
(Shiua & Yub, 2010).

Integrated Marketing
With an Integrated Marketing (IM) communication strategy, coffee shop can reduce
the brand damages (Craig, 2013). IM campaign can be implemented with limited
budget and shorter time period. This instrument helps coffee shop to compete with the
existing competitors that have more cash to through for expensive advertisement
campaigns. IM enables coffee shop to establish a regular and consistent
communication platform for building a good reputed brand.
One of the challenges that the coffee shop might face in establishing a good IM
campaign is that the distribution of the market power within the supply chain. The
things that are important to the coffee shop may have less importance for the suppliers
in the suppliers. This imbalance can cause brand damages. It is recommended to have
well informed IM strategy within the stakeholders to minimize the negative impacts.

Relationship Marketing
The goal of relationship marketing is to build a long-term relationship with the
customers, suppliers and employees. Relationship marketing programs such as
customer loyalty card can be issued to the consumers and encourages them to come
regularly. Implementation of effective present day relationship marketing strategies
will tie the customers for a long-term and contributes to the profitability of the
business (Venkatesh, 2013). The challenge of establishing good relationship
marketing programs includes customer reluctant to give personal information relevant
to build communication ( Ashleya, Noble, Dhonthu, & Lemon, 2011).
Some financial incentives can be given to the customers to encourage them to involve
in the relationship marketing programs. As relationship marketing is not limited to
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customers, the suppliers relationship should also be strengthen to maintain quality and
communicate the necessary changes.

Socially Responsible Marketing:
Marketing should not be simply to achieve profitability. Therefore socially
responsible marketing activities address the issues of ethical, environmental, legal,
and social contexts (Kotler & Keller, 2009). Coffee shop should educate suppliers
and other stakeholders about the way in which social responsibility strategy can be
established when designing marketing mix. The biggest challenge of implementing
this strategy is to make sure all the activities fit to the ethical standards expected by
the community. Relationship marketing allows lot of customer interaction with the
coffee shop. To attend their demands and make necessary changes based on changing
coffee drinkers lifestyle will be challenging (UK Essays, 2014).
Holistic marketing is a challenging brand equity instrument. With successful
designing and implementation of a holistic marketing strategy will lead to brand
building. In the modern day, coffee shop has to acquire relevant marketing
intelligence software to monitor the progress of the holistic marketing campaign.
Some of the challenges such as cultural, communication, ethical and alignment of
single goal by everyone in the making of Marketing Mix can be minimized with
preplanning, giving adequate budget & good marketing team.

4. Leveraging secondary association
Building brand equity can be achieved through leveraging a secondary association
with the coffee brand. Secondary brand association becomes relevant usually when
consumers have less or not aware of the new branding (Zhang, 2012).
One such way to associate secondary branding is to link coffee shop with one of the
celebrity. This strategy plays an important role in establishing awareness of the coffee
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shop existence and its brand attributes. Finding a relevant ambassador to the brand
involves identification of the character of the celebrity. For instance, whats the
relationship that the celebrity has with the target audience of the consumers and the
coffee?
Celebrities may have case damages to the brand. This happens when one celebrity is
used by different brands and makes over use of him (Zhang, 2012). Logically
inappropriate celebrity to promote brand may become in effective. Customers may
not always believe that the celebrity has sincerity in their promotion and also the
popularity may lose for the celebrity when time passes (Zhang, 2012).
According to Zhang (2012) choosing a well-defined and famous celebrity could
rectify the problems associated with bad branding. For example, Mr. Ali Ashfaq
(famous football player in the Maldives) could be used as an ambassador. He has
close connections with the target audience of youth for the Coffee Shop. Apart from
posting ambassadors picture on the advertising materials, ambassador can visit
regularly to the coffee shop.
Branding can be achieved through event sponsorship. The events that take place in the
Male that has target programs for the youth could be sponsored with the Coffee shop
brand. This tool could be very effective in Male as many young coffee drinkers
involve in some sorts of sports events conducted in the city.
Some events like football tournaments, TV programs and motorbike racing can be
sponsored. In short, the chosen event should have direct association with the product
and the target market (Malory, 2013). In other words, the successfulness of the brand
equity through event sponsorship depends on the right choice of event.
Gupta (2003) highlights some of the challenges in event sponsorship. This includes
sponsorships become too expensive for the companies to pay for or not worth
spending huge amounts on sponsorship compared to other marketing mediums. There
is also alignment problem of event objectives and the companys sponsorship
objectives. To achieve branding objectives of the coffee shop through event
sponsorship, there should be clear match between the strategic planning of the
company and the chosen sponsoring events (Gupta, 2003).
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Countries like Brazil, Ghana, Colombia and Indonesia promotes their coffee in the
world through mass marketing campaigns. Identification of product origin in the
marketing campaigns that associate with the coffee shop will be ideal to establish
brand equity.
This means that the brand knowledge of the origin country is borrowed to create
brand equity (Malory, 2013). This is an indirect approach of promoting the brand.
Ghana used to promote its coffee in the channels like National Geographic. This
origin can be used to associate the Coffee Shop as it creates a positive perception
about the coffee that the Coffee Shop sells.
Any problems or negative impact that appears to the coffee origin brand, the same
will be followed to the coffee shop as well. However, the countrys that work
tirelessly to promote their branded coffee will make effort to minimize the reaction of
the coffees negative image at any cost.
A well-designed strategic plan to establish leveraging secondary association to
promote brand identity of the coffee shop in the Male could be effective. The Coffee
shop should use instruments that minimize the challenges and negative consequences
in doing so.

5. Internal branding
Internal branding is a process in which marketers corporate its brand needs to the
employees of the company. Coffee shop branding can be internally marketed by
informing employees to identify the critical elements of building the brand enhance
their commitment and increase loyalty to the brand (Punjaisri & Wilson, 2011).
Staff training can be conducted to highlight the importance of helping organization as
a whole to create a branded coffee shop. Sales bonuses can be given in the Coffee
shop to motivate and make employees loyal to the brand. Promotions can be based on
the customer feedback about the staffs helpfulness in giving the service. This can be
only applied to the staffs that interact customers.
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Other staffs in the departments such as procurements and logistics can be monitored
using the number of problems that occurred during the work period. Hence
promotions can be given to those who perform well and guide to make better
performance to produce a good brand. The result of the internal branding could be
delivering brand promises to the consumers, and retain the good and loyal staffs in the
organization (Hsiao, 2013). There is always a positive correlation between the brand
loyalty, job satisfaction and internal branding programs (Leea, Kim, & Kim, 2003).
The According to Punjaisri & Wilson (2011) the demographic factors such as age,
education, and work experience combine with work environment leads to effect the
internal branding processes. This means the management will face the challenge of
having inconsistent branding efforts by different employees of the organization
(Punjaisri & Wilson, 2011). Therefore management should focus on job satisfaction
and increasing incentives to the employees to perform better when doing the job. An
employees bad attitude might damage the branding efforts within a short period of
time. Therefore close monitoring of the staff and training is relevant to make the
Internal Branding effort successful.
Therefore whole business processes, procedure and even the other resources such as
equipment should be treated as branding tools internally. Making all the employees in
same page is crucial and the communication or the brand tone that everyone uses
should be consistent across the employees.

6. Brand communities
Brand communities are group of people who have like-minded for the company
brand. They indirectly promote the brand. Basically individuals affiliate themselves
with the values of the brand or the branding promises. It builds a long-term
relationship between company and the consumers. Consumers themselves consider
level of belongingness and engagement to the brand.
Brodie et al. (2011) argued that the consumer engagement process comprises a range
of sub-processes reflecting consumers' interactive experience within brand
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communities, and value co-creation among community participants. Engagement by
the consumers with the brand enhances the brand loyalty, satisfaction, empowerment,
connection, emotional bonding, trust and commitment (Brodie et al., 2011).
Consumers are mainly engage with social relatedness, symbolic meaning of the brand
and personal involvement they enjoy( Morandin, Bagozzi, & Bergamia, 2013).
When branding coffee shop through creating brand communities needs the investment
on programs that creates customers to engage frequently with the product or come
frequently to the shop. Branding community should be a business strategy rather than
a marketing strategy (Kotler & Keller, 2009). This means that the business as a whole
should contribute to the creation of brand community. The coffee shop will enjoy
revenue from repeated consumers and indirect marketing of the consumers
themselves. The Coffee shop will also have the benefit of understanding the consumer
behavior and design the marketing tools to sustain the customer base.
The coffee can use social media such as Facebook to maintain the customer base and
strengthen the brand community involvement with the brand. To make branding
community strategy successful, the coffee shop should manage and learn from the
customer interactions. A study of the User-Generated-Content and Market-Generated-
Content fount that there is a positive correlation between engagement in social media
brand communities and increased sales (Goh, Heng, & Lin, 2013). This suggests that
consumers are persuaded when positive information are passed amoung the loyal
brand communities.
Customers in the brand community learn the benefits of the brand and contribute to
community commitments. This ultimately results in forming oppositional brand
loyalty to the competing brands ( Kuo & Feng, 2013).
Sometimes, brand communities influence the brand and contribute to negative brand
trust ( Habibi, Laroche, & Richard, 2014). Therefore it is challenging to continually
make the brand community committed to the brand. The budget constraints and the
corporate culture of the coffee shop may affect the successful community branding as
branding community cannot be achieve only with social media marketing, but also
through internal integrated relation to it.
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7. Conclusion
This analysis found that there are different tools that the coffee shop can use to make
itself unique and create a good brand equity. Brand equity can be achieved through
different elements of brand like brand name, logo and brand tone. Holistic marketing
plays a vital role in making the companies brand elements successful. In other it helps
to create good brand for the company that has associations such as positive perceived
values. Branding can also be borrowed from leveraging secondary associations.
Internal marketing is crucial to set a same mindset in all the employees to focus on
building value to the companys brand. Branding communities are challenging
business strategies that benefit the coffee shop in establishing many loyal customers
that contributes the profitability of the company.
It is recommended to emphasis on building brands when designing the business and
marketing strategies for the growth of the coffee shop. Senior management of the
coffee shop should not under-estimate the power of good brand. This coffee shop can
apply if not all, some of the marketing instruments discussed. To achieve the profit
maximization goals, company has to implement accurate marketing and business
strategies that creates value and makes customers reminded about the offerings.
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