I had been in Korea less than 24 hours and already the number and diversity of chain coffee shops had surprised me. Whilst some people may call Seattle the home of the coffee shop, Seoul seems to have far more at least in terms of independent coffee shops and chain coffee shops.
The quality of chain coffee shops seem to vary enormously and they seem to be very segmented in terms of their offering. Whilst Starbucks is in the Korean market with a substantial footprint – it hasn’t managed to achieve total market dominance in the way it has in the UK.
From the small mom-and-pop shop feel of Mr Coffee to the mega-chain to Tom Tom Coffee there is something for everyone:
Coffee Bean – Korea’s oldest successful coffee shop brand isn’t as trendy as Caffé Bene. It has a mix of coffee and tea drink alternatives similar to Starbucks. It uses wi-fi enabled buzzer to let you know when your order is ready. Coffee Bean is much better quality coffee than many of its competitors including Caffé Bene
Caffé Bene – the shop aims for a third-space type feel similar to Starbucks – but with a Korean modern design aesthetic. The restaurant has a range of coffees on its menu including Ethiopian blend. Generally the coffee is milder than Starbucks. It also is known for its food; which is a grade above Starbucks. Caffé Bene uses wi-fi enabled buzzers to let you know when your order is available to pick up from the counter. Drip coffee is about two and a half times the price of the UK. Despite weak coffee, Caffé Bene has grown to 700 branches throughout Korea
Angel-in-us – aimed more at female customers, apart from the cute mug designs is is very similar in terms of its product and feel to Caffé Bene
Mr Coffee is a kiosk operation found at local mass transit stations – it makes a passable cup of coffee
Tom n Toms: ubiquitous chain, not known for the quality of its coffee. Inside it is very similar to an American style family restaurant like Dennys
Twosome Place – aimed at women. It has a selection of beautifully presented cakes as an indulgence. . Advertised with a good-looking male celebrity selling a fantasy experience. It is also the chain with the best coffee. if you can handle the smooth marketing alongside The Coffee Bean, A Twosome Place is probably the best major chain to frequent
Things to watch out for:
Prices are generally a third more expensive than Starbucks in other countries such as the UK, Hong Kong and US
Forget the flat white, the trendy coffee to order here is the ‘hand drip’ served in a lot of the independent coffee shops
People generally don’t understand what a black coffee is; they call it an americano even when its a filter coffee
Paid for wi-fi – this maybe due to the ubiquity of LTE | 4G networks and wi-fi bundled into domestic cellular deals. There is one variety of milk available – diary | full-fat. If you don’t have Internet Explorer | PC chances are that you won’t be able to sign up for a temporary account due to Korean reliance on ActiveX for online security – insane, but true
Milk – if you are on a diet or lactose intolerant go for black coffee, as milk generally doesn’t have any choices that you can make to customize your drink
Social, search, mobile and TV is the first in a series of posts of observations and thoughts from my recent trip to Korea.
I was stuck by how mobile and TV advertising integration is achieved through QRcodes, search social and e-commerce. The consumer is surrounded in a brand membrane whilst at home in front of the TV.
Korea is known for being advanced in social networks and search engines. Twitter has a vibrant community there, but Me2Day gives it a good run for its money.
KakaoTalk is like a multi-platform version of BBM that brands are using to engage with fans and mature platforms like Cafe Daum, Naver and CyWorld can still school Silicon Valley on all things social.
The country also has a diverse and vibrant eco-system of television stations with a lot of content based around K-pop stars and celebrity participation. TV is available on mobile devices and is one of the main engines of popular culture. TV enjoys a viewership that you don’t see in the UK or Europe any more.
Given these two vibrant media eco-systems; advertisers and television commerce operations seek to do multichannel marketing. Here are some examples I took pictures of during a five-minute period during a mid-morning commercial break.
Daum Mobile search is suggested as Daum is known as a site that provides content of interest for women. Encouraging mobile use allows for an immediate call to action.
Han Hea Youn is a Korean fashion designer who sells her range of clothing via TV shopping channel. The QRcode at the top of the screen allows for the audience to get more information online and make a purchase.
Where the product isn’t specifically aimed at a female audience the commercials recommended a search term for Naver Mobile.
These commercial sections were not best-practice but indicated how true integrated multichannel has become a hygiene factor in Korean advertising campaigns. More related content here.
A while ago I built a framework from a hodge lodge of ideas to think about social marketing with being useful as a foundational element. I was thinking about this as I read a number of Chinese news sources, the name Lei Feng had started coming up a lot recently. The reason why it was coming up was that it marked the 50th anniversary of Mr Lei’s death. The Chinese government was trying to use this date to encourage a greater sense of community and altruism in modern Chinese society including a Weibo hashtag with Monday having been ‘Learn from Lei Feng’ day.
Being useful exemplar – Lei Feng
Mr Lei was a 22-year old soldier who drove military trucks for a living. He was killed when a telegraph pole was felled by another truck and landed on his cab. This would have been just another sad but unnoteworthy accident, had not Mr Lei left behind a 200,000 word diary which was naturally full of content about how great the party was and documented an otherwise selfless life where he continually focused on being useful to those in his community.
Mr Lei was an orphan which meant that it was easier to use him posthumously as an example to others. March in Chinese schools is learn from Lei Feng month. Today Mr Lei is considered with mixed feelings by Chinese people; his selflessness is at odds with a laissez-faire market economy and the use of his life is viewed with some cynicism by many.
Regardless of the realpolitik surrounding the legacy of Lei Feng his focus on being useful could teach brands a lot about social media.
A lot of the time colleagues and clients come up to me and say we want something that’s ‘viral’ and I die a little inside. Its all about the brand rather than the brand interaction with the consumer.
I wish there were more brands that aspired to being useful. It’s simple to do, it opens a natural point for engagement because it fits nicely into the intent and context of the audience: – it builds long-term relationships rather than campaign statistics.
Being useful in action
A couple of great examples of being useful include the University of Westminster who provide tips on the shops and restaurants who offer students discounts.
Or the way Vodafone in the UK uses social media as the tip of the spear to address customer care issues.
I contacted Vodafone so that I could merge my identities into one, with one place to manage my devices on the Vodafone network. I got in touch by Twitter; they responded below:
I then completed a web-based form and was contacted by phone by one of the web team called Cate. She explained to me how they were going to address what I needed and resolved the problem without my having to hang on listening to hold music a la my previous experiences with 3UK or T-Mobile.
Now I am not suggesting that we all dress in olive fatigues; but it would be a good idea to lift ourselves out of what do we want – profits, fame, fortune, a Cannes Lion award and instead start thinking a bit more about the person on the other end of the communication. Being useful like Lei Feng and being open to the insights that this provides is also more likely to provide the inspiration over time for a really great word-of-mouth idea upon which you can start to built your path to fame and glory as a marketer.
I’ve known All Is Social author Graham for a number of years. We first met when he ran MobileYouth selling marketing research to mobile operators, focused on the youth market. All is social is a mix: Graham’s own journey as an observer of Japanese society during his time as a JET scheme member and onwards with his experience in market research to date and a treatise on the interactions of consumers and brands. He considers that this all has an essential social component which makes a lot of sense.
Graham puts out marketing, the idea of branding on its head. Instead brand comes from consumer’s use for the brand. The brand as tool, or what we describe as ‘intent and context’ at Ruder Finn. He thinks that innovation is in the use rather than the design. I’d be less inclined to completely believe this, when I think about how iconic design and engineering can make a difference:
Dieter Rams work at Braun, which was part of the German economic miracle and has echoed down into many Apple products
Christian Lindholm’s work at Nokia on smartphone user experience: S60
The industrial of design of Sony from the 1960s through the 1990s
Henry Ford and the Model T
The user experience of Twitter and Google
But anthropological co-creation can make a real difference. Whilst Graham’s writing focuses on young people, I think that it the principles fit consumers in general. Check it out Kindle. More book reviews here.
One of the things that I had been thinking about for a while was the way the smartphone handset market; the Android eco-system had the value hollowed out of the business for the manufacturers including the Samsung brand. In some ways this process seemed to mirror what happened in the PC market through the 1990s and into the 2000s.
Home computing
But let’s go back to where it all began. Back at the end of the 1960s and into the early 1970s, home computing meant having a ‘dumb terminal’ connected to a mainframe or mini-computer at a large corporation or university via a telephone line. Due to the price of local calls in the US versus Europe; it was natural that should develop first in any meaningful way. Even then it was used by a very small number of early adopters. At this time Samsung was better known in Korea for fertiliser and started a partnership with Sanyo to learn about electronics.
However there was a latent demand for personal computing, you had a few geeky counterculture types who had an old mini-computer in a building and provided terminals and accounts to members of the public and community groups free of charge. Outside San Francisco however this latent demand wasn’t being met. The Homebrew Computer Club that held most of their meetings in an auditorium attached to the Stanford Linear Accelerator had a different idea.
In essence they looked to reinvent personal computing by using simpler less powerful hardware. This unleashed a wealth of innovation from the first spreadsheet to at-home stock-trading and eventually World of Warcraft.
Mobile devices are a similar point of reset in personal computing. Many of the tasks that we do from word processing to entertainment don’t necessarily need the amount of computing power that we have. Secondly even this Mac that I am writing the post on probably has lots of unnecessary code that isn’t really required by me. For people who don’t create a lot of content mobile devices from tablets to smartphones are ideal for their needs in many respects.
Beyond this moving forward through simplicity there is another aspect to the the rise of mobile devices that mirrors the PC world; like the Windows Intel eco-system before it – the Android ARM eco-system is becoming commoditised; defined by specification (processor, Android version and screen dimensions). This is what Nokia was afraid of when they decided not to go down the Android route; though the level of control that Microsoft has over Windows Phone hardware specification and and user experience could be argued make the lack of differentiation amongst Android competitors a mute point.
HTC looks as if they have been trying to do something about this, in terms of hardware: purchasing a majority stake in fashion audio brand Beats Electronics LLC and S3 Graphics. This was matched by a similar effort in software with their HTC Sense interface skin with some productivity and communications applications.
Technology marketers haven’t been doing themselves any favours with co-marketing budget type ads like these ones that I took a picture of last year for different Motorola phone models.
In reality, the HTC Sense interface isn’t the differentiator that one would have thought, they haven’t yet used the Beats audio brand in any meaningful way, nor has the S3 graphics come into the marketing mix. Sony Ericsson and Motorola have fared worse and Samsung has come out on top.
Why has Samsung been successful?
I think that this is down to a number of factors:
Samsung like Nokia has built up an extensive effective global logistics and channel network
An extension of this would be Samsung’s relationships with wireless carriers
Samsung can sweat the supply chain largely because it owns the supply chain: it makes LCD screens, memory, ARM procesors for instance. Thus allowing it to compete on price/performance points that many of the other players couldn’t match
In this respect, Samsung’s operational efficiency and effectiveness is similar to Dell in it’s prime (the main difference is that Dell wasn’t a vertically-integrated component manufacturer). Samsung’s head marketer Younghee Lee wants to turn Samsung into an emotional brand rather than a rational one. Historically consumers have known Samsung as making reasonably good products; but many didn’t even realise that the company is Korean rather than Japanese.
The company has a modicum of product design smarts that has allowed it to make in-roads in the television and brown goods markets at the expense of Panasonic and Sony – but it still isn’t operating at the same level of design acclaim as Apple.
Ms Lee’s aspiration for people to feel something about the Samsung brand is at odds with the adverts that the company has been running in the US.
(The embedded video is on Tudou, so will need patience whilst it loads).
The adverts generally follow a pattern:
Attacking iPhone customers as foolish zealots
Demonstrate a Samsung | Android feature
Finish on a rational message
It is the advertising equivalent of the Japanese phrase that ‘the nail that stands up must be hammered down‘. The problem for Samsung is that you don’t get a consumer to switch brands by berating or insulting them; those kind of motivators tend to only work as a line management technique in command-and-control companies (a la Apple).
Secondly, the rational reason doesn’t give a reason to switch from Motorola or HTC to Samsung with the disdain of iPhone customers as a common bond.
If Samsung wants to become a brand that consumers feel passion for, it won’t come through these attack adverts, but from the product design outwards in every part of the customer experience. In this respect Ms Lee’s hands are tied – as the product design and customer experience would need to be raised consistently across the Samsung product range; not just smartphones to make this happen effectively.
It takes years to get this right in an organisation of the scale of Samsung, whilst that is happening Samsung can consider how it can do more appropriate consumer marketing and advertising – I’d suggest by thinking about how to encourage and empower existing Samsung customers to become passionate advocates of the brand.
