I don’t drink coffee at all; not for the caffeine, the taste nor the social aspect. I don’t hate coffee per se, and I don’t have a dependence on it so I would say I am pretty impartial. That might be why I found this series of 3 blogs on coffee interesting, as it covers , where coffee comes from, and how it became linked to productivity.

I found the first article the most interesting because I did not know that in the 70s, coffee was actually very unpopular; kind of like tap water today. In order to trump up interest, the coffee marketing was changed.

For the coffee industry to survive, it needed a new marketing strategy. Kenneth Roman, Jr., the president of Ogilvy and Mather, one of the PR firms that supported Maxwell House, made a suggestion: emphasize quality, value, and image by creating segmented products to increase appeal (Roseberry 1996: 765).

Initial I thought this was a bit dirty since basically the coffee markers manipulated society to like coffee even though the product as a whole was not much different. But now I think it actually makes a lot of sense. It wasn’t really manipulation but rather the coffee markers discovered that they didn’t design the products very well. To fix this, they analyzed their customers and designed their products to fit them!

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: coffee, history, marketing