So this morning I had the great idea of putting up content from my university days. I’m taking the gamble that the guys I worked with won’t mind in each instance. Having looked back at some of the work, it is questionable if I’ll open it all up as a resource as some is indeed old and total irrelevant.

Anyway back to the title. This was a study into student’s coffee consumption habits and how they could be marketed to with focused messaging that would change behaviour to boost consumption. Forget about the 4 P’s here and even the newly fangled 4 C’s, what we are interested in here is the psychology and behavioural stimulation of a target group.

Here are some small extracts from the report. I hope you find it useful and interesting. It has been working on projects like this that has helped shaped my interest in understanding humanity. Remember I was investigating here student’s behaviour, results would vary for different group.

“The current Generation Y the so called ‘millennial’ generation are intrinsically different from their predecessors. Their understanding and ways they interact with the environment results in them having different needs and expectations, which marketers must take into account. Their age means they have different values and psychosocial needs and it is these needs that are important to concentrate on; rather than what has happened up until now, where advertisements have excessively focused on the concrete and abstract attributes of the product and some of the functional benefits.

For coffee the affective responses are of significant importance. It may be argued that people often consume coffee due to it triggering a sensory response (affective) which without it, it may not have been purchased. Once the coffee is purchased, then its roll changes and is now affected by cognitive stimuli; now the consumer may not be worried by the actual product but how it is perceived by others around them (does this make me look good, or do I fit in?). From people that were questioned it was found that they initially started to drink coffee due to their environment and their need to fit in; again this highlights psychosocial importance.

To continue on the psychosocial theme “consumers…think about the positive and negative consequences of products use as possible benefits or potential risk.” It is the job of the marketer to underline the positive benefits without exposing any of risk to the consumer. When marketing to the consumers their experience must match up to the image created by the advertisement. If this is not the case then a desirable means end chain would not be met and further product involvement would be avoided.

In essence coffee has been determined to be a medium involvement product. This report has emphasized that the psychosocial benefits of coffee, as highlighted in the means-end chain, these benefits should play the most important role in the strategy adopted by the manufacturers to target this demographic.”

‘Branding the experience and experiencing the brand’ was the quintessential message that report hoped and this blog wanted to convey. I think too often marketers forget this and concentrate on the relative unimportance of the product without considering it in a wider context.

Well I’m sure you could take more information from the study if this does indeed interest you. Download it here. Comments more than welcome.

Maybe Doctor Moskowitz quote that I wrote about here, where perfection comes in plurals should also extends to environmental plurals.