Exploring Customer’s minds

For this hunting to be complete, we consider that it is crucial to ask “the real dealers” what do they like and dislike about the Coffee-Shops. Therefore, we have created a Consumer’s Questionnaire (you can find the blank questionnaire at the end of this post) to have an idea of the several dimensions regarding consumer’s level knowledge and involvement about the category and also, their opinion about the store and products themselves. Although, this study is not statistically relevant, due to not possessing enough data (30 questionnaires per store), this study has the main objective of providing general thoughts about the three Coffee-Shops.

Apart from Brown’s Coffee-Shop, these questionnaires were done in-store. We asked the consumers to evaluate several dimensions according to their preferences, so as to better understand the purchasing behavior. Overall, people tend to give more importance to the shop atmosphere, service quality and taste & quality of the products. The attributes with a lower level of consideration were quickness of the service, location and price. The latter, is understandable giving that we are talking about a premium segment whose product purchase doesn’t require a high involvement. Taking into consideration the consumer’s disregard for the price, Starbucks takes advantage of this by charging, on average, a much higher price for their products as we saw previously in Taking a closer look at competition – I post.

Considering now the particular aspects of each store, Brown’s Coffee-Shop seems to be preferred due to its calm and relaxing atmosphere as well as spacious store. Actually, it is classified by several websites as one of the best places to study in Lisbon. The downside aspects mentioned by the respondents were the quality of the service as it is considered rather impersonal and careless. There seems to be a tendency to find the store either online or when walking downtown. Next, regarding Jeronymo’s Coffee-Shop, the respondents found both store and location appealing to visit. Finally, Starbucks’ Coffee-Shop, the stand out aspects were the atmosphere of the shop, the quality and variety of the products.  At Starbucks, there seems to be a perfect match between what clients value more and what the store has to offer.

We also did a brand recall exercise and the results speak for themselves: everyone that answered the questionnaire either at Jeronymo’s or Brown’s, recalled Starbucks, whereas the opposite was not verified.