Buyer Preferences Ccd and Barista

Buyer Preferences:

Companies like CCD and Barista chose the experience way of attracting consumers to their outlets rather than going the usual product route way. When CCD first opened their outlet in India in the late 90's it offered its consumers free cappuccinos as add-on whenever they bought internet time at their cafes. People liked it and today CCD close to Rs.500 crores revenues from this sector. So people started visiting these cafes out of curiosity and they started tasting these lattes, frappes and cappuccinos and liked them and eventually became part of a loyal customer base. Let us have a look at the following extract from a leading daily about people visiting coffee shops in India:

"Aditi Gupta, 22, sits with three other twenty something friends nursing an iced vanilla latte late on a weekday night at a Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf outlet in a New Delhi market. Two doors down is a Café Coffee Day, and across the square is a Barista coffee shop. She and her friends go for coffee sometimes several times a week. "When you don't want to drink, when you just want to chill, you come here," says Gupta. "In today's time, the youth doesn't mind spending 150 rupees [about $3] for a cup of coffee because they know it will cost them that much to be out of the house anyway." What would test their loyalty? "I think if our parents came here, we would definitely prefer some other place to go to -- that's the point," says Vikrant Rai, a 21-year-old working at a marketing company."

This sums it up all. In a conservative country like India where the parents consider hanging out in cafes or pubs is considered a social stigma and is looked down upon by the society, the rapid growth of coffee shops is causing a cultural shift as well one of taste. It is a place where youngsters hang out - it is also a birthplace of many creative ideas. Many poems or short stories were first penned down in a coffee shop. Rise of the Indian middle class if also contributing to the growth of cafes. Consumers are keen to pay a premium for these products because they want to understand the product's novelty and unique taste.