"Welcome to Five Senses Coffee"

It’s Friday and you find yourself fronting the bar at a smart inner city bar with some work colleagues. Despite being a dedicated VB man at home, you begrudgingly step up and pay $9 for a pint of unpronounceable Belgian beer made by an obscure group of monks. You take a tentative sip and your palate is swamped with flavours. It’s totally delicious and is so far removed from your normal VB experience it’s as though you’re drinking an entirely new beverage. Complex, intriguing and satisfying, it leaves you searching the little library of flavours in your brain after every sip, searching for that elusive flavour.

The challenge in the coffee industry is to create this same kind of ‘wow’ moment and get people to pay higher prices for rare and unusual coffees. Here are some tips:

Create some theatre

People want to get bang for their buck. Allowing customers to watch you grind the coffee to order and brew it via a Clever Coffee Dripper or Syphon will add another dimension to their experience. Look at getting some special glassware to showcase the drink and escalate the occasion.

Tell the story

Invite the customer to take the journey with you. Make sure there are tasting notes available and some background information about the coffee and the people who grow it. Make it emotive rather than merely informative. “Lovingly hand tended from heirloom cultivars in the highlands of Ethiopia” is a lot more engaging than “Grown in east Africa at 1600 metres above sea level”.

Get your staff excited

Make sure your staff have tasted the coffee and are excited about it. There’s nothing like a personal endorsement from their favourite barista to get a customer enthused.

Get controversial

Just google “$12 cup of coffee” to see what I mean!

It ain’t bragging if you can do it!

Don’t be afraid to make a bold statement. Statements like “Best coffee ever!” “The world’s finest coffee” and so on create hype.

Remember, showcasing unique coffees and pricing appropriately can have flow on effects to other areas of your business. You will be sending a clear message that you’re different and better than the other cafés in your area. The challenging $10 per cup special you run for a week will make it much easier to sell the $6 per cup coffees in ensuing weeks. People in the area will come by to see what the fuss is all about and this gives you the opportunity to win them over.

Creating a tangible point of difference will add value to your business and keep your staff and customers stimulated and happy.