Why Your Coffee Brand Needs To Be Unique
Coffee is everywhere. And in 2024, good coffee is everywhere.
From major cities to small towns, it’s possible to find espresso, latte art, pour-overs, and single origins from around the world, beautifully roasted & served fresh.
So how do you make sure your coffee brand stands out?
How do companies like Blue Bottle achieve such recognition and create so many raving fans?
How can you compete not only with the other coffee brands in your area, but national giants like Starbucks & Dunkin’?
Assuming that your coffee is good (and if you’re reading this blog, it probably is) the most important thing you can do to stand head & shoulders above the competition is to build a unique coffee brand.
Beyond just having an eye-catching logo & cool merch, a unique, well-defined coffee brand goes a long way toward making sure that you’re insulated from the competition & are attracting your ideal customers to your shop, your website, & your shelf at the grocery store.
In this article, we’ll look at 3 of the main reasons you should be building a unique brand for your coffee business:
You give customers a reason to go out of their way
You attract wholesale customers to you
You don’t have to compete on price
Let’s get to it.
You give customers a reason to go out of their way
I recently went back to Brooklyn to visit family and friends.
While there we got coffee at La Cabra’s cafe in the East Village. This coffee shop and bakery is the Danish company’s 3rd location in NY, and it was a fantastic & memorable experience.
The cafe was buzzing with energy: people streamed in & out of the doors and it was an exciting place to be. The smell of freshly-baked sourdough mixed with the smell of coffee to create an amazing atmosphere for coffee & a bite.
But here’s the thing:
This neighborhood is already packed with good coffee. Walk a couple of blocks in any direction and you’ll find a place to get a cappuccino and a pastry.
However, many of those other shops weren’t packed the way La Cabra was.
It wasn’t just the people who lived and worked closest to the cafe who were visiting: plenty of guests had to walk past other coffee shops - maybe multiple coffee shops - to drink & eat at La Cabra.
And that’s one of the superpowers of a unique brand:
You give customers a reason to go out of their way.
When customers know the kind of experience they’re going to have, they’ll gladly travel past one or more other cafes to have the experience they’re looking for.
In the case of La Cabra it’s the Danish minimalism aesthetic, the amazing aromas of freshly baked bread mixing with coffee, and the excitement & energy of being in a popular location.
Without those key elements, the space would be just another coffee shop in a neighborhood saturated with coffee shops.
When you’re just one decent option among many, then customers will come in your doors if they happen to be walking by or need a place to meet a friend on your block… but they won’t travel across town or even a few blocks out of their way.
But La Cabra’s customers know the kind of experience they can expect, and it’s an experience worth traveling for.
So how do you make sure your customers are getting an experience worth traveling for?
The key thing to do is to define what it is about your business that customers will remember. Is it your extreme attention to detail when it comes to customer service & the craft of coffee? Is it your design & decor? Is it the bakery attached to the cafe that smells amazing?
Knowing this is how you get customers to walk right by the competition to order coffee at your counter.
There’s more benefits to a great brand than just keeping your retail space full, though.
Wholesale, one of the key money-makers for roasting companies, gets a huge boost from having a unique brand.
You attract wholesale customers to you
When I opened Gorilla Coffee I didn’t have to do a lot of sales. We grew the company year after year, landing wholesale account after wholesale account, but I never really “got good at sales.”
Instead of dialing hundreds of bakeries, bagel shops, and hotels around New York and trying to make sales, I focused on our own cafe and our own coffee.
In short: I focused on building a brand.
And as we became a well-known and well-loved cafe in the area, with a customer base who knew they could come to us for high-quality coffee before it was as easy to find as it is today…
…Wholesale customers started coming to us.
Our sales process was fully focused on building a brand and being really good at what we did.
So instead of talking to bakers, chefs, and F&B managers at hotels who had never heard of us and trying to convince them to buy our coffee - which is what most roasters do when they’re trying to win wholesale accounts - we just served those people coffee in our cafes.
Owners and managers at wholesale accounts who were brewing hundreds of pounds of coffee a week were coming to us.
All we had to do to grow our wholesale program was build a great brand, give people a uniquely enjoyable experience, and be ready when opportunities came our way.
So how do you start attracting top wholesale customers to your brand? How do you make your sales process smoother & easier buy creating the same type of unique experience?
Start by thinking about the wholesale accounts that you’d like to win.
Trendy new bakeries have different needs for a coffee brand than a hotel, or a college campus.
Then think about what those companies - and the people who own and operate them - want in a coffee brand.
Is it all about quality? Is it about graphic design? Consistency? Price?
Find out what’s important to your ideal wholesale customer, and then work on conveying those values in your retail brand, on your website, and in your cafes day in & day out.
When the right people know that your coffee is consistent with their values, partnering with you on their coffee program becomes a no-brainer.
So let’s go over one final benefit to building a unique, memorable, and consistent brand.
You don’t have to compete on price
Coffee is a commodity product, and most of the coffee sold every day is cheap.
In fact, so many businesses that aren’t specialty coffee companies are practically giving coffee away at cost, just to get people in the door. Donut shops, breakfast places, diners… Plenty of these businesses are brewing the cheapest possible coffee for their customers.
Then you’ve got national & regional chains like Dunkin’ and Starbucks, who will always be able to outcompete a small coffee roaster on price because of the volume of coffee they’re roasting & selling.
Getting stuck competing on price with these high-volume businesses becomes a race to the bottom. And it’s a race that small coffee roasters will lose.
Building a unique brand lets you compete in other areas.
La Cabra doesn’t have to worry about what the Starbucks around the corner charges for a coffee and a pastry, or how much a cup of joe costs at the greasy spoon across the street.
La Cabra’s customers are looking for the specific type of experience that they can only get at a La Cabra cafe, and they’re happy to pay a higher-than-commodity price for that experience.
And it’s the same for every unique coffee brand that does a good job of making sure their customers understand their uniqueness.
How can you step out of the price competition & start reaching customers who will gladly pay whatever prices you need to charge?
Figure out your “Coffee +”
La Cabra doesn’t just offer coffee. They offer coffee + fresh sourdough + a Danish minimalist aesthetic that their customers love.
Coffee alone guarantees you’ll have to compete on price.
But coffee + indigenous women’s rights makes your brand appealing to a specific slice of the market.
Coffee + bicycling, or coffee + snowboarding plugs you into communities that share a common passion.
With good coffee more available than it’s ever been, the brands that are standing out and rising above the price war are those that have a strong, clearly articulated “Coffee +”
Conclusion
Making good coffee isn’t enough to build a brand. The best, most memorable coffee brands aren’t just focused on coffee quality: they’re focused on creating a memorable experience.
In short: they’re focused on building a unique brand.
Having a unique brand is so much more than a catchy logo and cool colors:
It’s the ability to make your coffee stand out among the thousands of other cafes, bags of beans, and RTD options that are out there.
Three of the most important reasons to not just make good coffee, but to build a unique coffee brand, are:
You give customers a reason to go out of their way
You attract wholesale customers to you
You don’t have to compete on price
At Black Sheep Coffee Collab this uniqueness is front and center with all the work we do with our coffee industry clients.
Schedule your free Brand Uniqueness Audit at the link below: