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The first store of Cutbacks was first located in Cattle’s Pike Place Market, America, in 1971 with its mission settled at the very soon stage “to inspire and nurture the human spirit – one arson, one cup and one neighborhood at a time” (Cutbacks, 2012). The company Is well-known and successfully expanded over the world because It has provided a totally different kind of service for customers to enjoy comfortable and relaxed environment in each Cutbacks store, which is called the third place between work and home, with their friends or quietly while having the best cups of coffee here.
In order to describe the friendly atmosphere at Cutbacks stores, the company has said: “It’s not unusual to see people coming to Cutbacks to chat, meet up or even work. We’re a neighborhood gathering place, a part of the daily routine – and we couldn’t be happier about it” (Cutbacks. 2012).
In 2009, along with the expansion of economic crisis and especially the strong development of Mecca, the same business model of coffeehouse chain as Cutbacks under the support of McDonald’s brand name, Cutbacks therefore come up with a new advertising campaign to recruit the attentions from its new customer segmentation (the young people) via social networks that started on mid of May 2009 In six major cities of the U. S (Claire, 2009).
The campaign, emphasized Cutbacks coffee quality as Its mall Idea toward Intended customers, was run through online tools (Youth, Twitter, and Faceable) with the support of outdoor and print ads in order to hire customer attention as well as remain their loyalty (Claire, 2009). CONTEXT ANALYSIS Cutbacks, with its very beginning objective to be a third place apart from work and home, has been chosen by its customers to inspire their spirits by enjoying good drinks while reading newspaper, chatting with friends or even talking to Cutbacks staffs In the stores.
People come to Cutbacks do not just to buy drinks or cakes but to ay the environment this coffeehouse chain providing. They enjoy the time at Cutbacks stores as a place to refresh their mind after a whole day of working or to start a new day. The store atmosphere and staffs who are able to be very flexible to response customers’ requirements with the policy “Just Say Yes” are considered as two of three main factors bringing successes to Cutbacks (Younger, 2006). Those things this company providing Its customers make Cutbacks different from the other Mr..
Howard Schultz (chairman, president as well as C. E. O of Cutbacks) being more suitable for the elderly than the young people nowadays. In a research Cutbacks generated in 2002, it was showed that the attraction of this coffee store was not towards the new customer generation with only 25 out of 100 grades for Cutbacks based on overall opinion and 26% of them thought this organization had highest quality coffee (Younger, 2006) whereas the established customers rated for 44 grades and 41% respectively (exhibit 1).
This campaign was raised among the difficult situation of Cutbacks when its sales were reported to reduce by 8% in the first three months of year 2009 (Claire, 2009). Meanwhile, McDonald’s promoted their new sub rand Mecca employed full use of medias including Television, print, radio, billboard and web ads with the huge expense of more than $100 million (Claire, 2009). Cutbacks, instead of facing directly with McDonald’s in the same kinds of media, chose different ways to go with cheaper costs to send its messages to new target market – social networks.
OBJECTIVES There were two main tasks of marketing communication being supposed to fulfill in this campaign. First and foremost, it was to reinforce the brand awareness and brand attention among target audiences in order to make them have strong memory on Cutbacks rather than other rivals. The second task was to differentiate the company image from its competitors, especially Mecca, by assuring to provide top quality of coffee products and services. Those objectives were at the same time aiming to enhance Cutbacks branding values through specific actions, to rise positive thinking about company image.
The above tasks of this campaign were run by employing limited media tools to translate Cutbacks messages to its established and potential clients based on quality focus. The company has tried to differentiate itself from other competitors by telling customers to avoid the idea of “all coffee’s the same” said Terry Davenport, Chief Marketing Officer at Cutbacks (Claire, 2009). And then from that point, the clients could improve their opinions how Cutbacks could be different from the rivals through experience this organization gave during the campaign.
The idea was to tend to make people clearly understand the difference between coffee quality of Cutbacks and the others and therefore go for Cutbacks because of this prominent point. Besides, by focusing completely on the quality of coffee delivered to customers, Cutbacks has shown its specific way of making coffee by telling their Tories about coffee in order to remind audiences the products with top quality as well as services at Cutbacks stores.
Loyal customers one more time could consider Cutbacks as their best choices so far and hence decide to continue going along with the company as long as possible. The campaign objective was also to satisfy its existing customers to emphasize Cutbacks image of sneak and luxury brand of coffee. This campaign was also based on a traditional activity of the most impassioned Cutbacks fans to hold an online contest for people posting their first pictures with the local Cutbacks Christmas decorated stores (Dan, 2009).
It was Leary to increase the brand awareness by encouraging people get involved into the campaign as a part of it, not only the audiences but the participants. STRATEGY Cutbacks has been already known as the biggest coffeehouse chain in the world, the campaign therefore was indicated to go for emotional aspect of customers. However, aspect that went together but not at a large scale. The role of this new campaign must be creating values on Cutbacks brand in order for customers to reduce perceived risks through social and performance issues rather than looking for a provoke purchasing behavior (Fill, 2009).
The strategy of the company towards audiences, indeed, was to increase the effect of its messages to earn more engagement from them and then change their attitudes from cognitive to affective and finally could be connotative that leads to actions (Fill, 2009). That was clearly the true meaning behind emotional messages sent to customers enhancing people’s trust in Cutbacks brand through firmed and assured texts.
This campaign, on the one hand, paid more attention on new customer generation who could be the prospects of this coffee brand for their whole life if the campaign was supposed to be exceedingly successful to perform how Cutbacks deserve to be chosen. The organization reformed their understanding towards this kind of customers through the strategic tools to deliver their messages – online networks – that usually used to implement behavioral marketing strategy. The young people are now engaging internet with their most affection, and online media has become tools for them to communicate and share their lives to others.
This point was therefore utilized by Cutbacks when coming up with the campaign to change the attitudes of its new target market to convert transaction exchanges to collaborative ones in order to earn more stakeholders loyal to the brand. On the other hand, the new advertising campaign of Cutbacks also tried to reinforce its current customers about the true value of this brand and consequences those people could give Cutbacks great supports via social networks by sharing their stories and good memories with Cutbacks.
By employing the model of relationship marketing, Cutbacks was about to translate the Loyalty ladder into company strategy to step by step getting trusts from the prospects and changing them into Cutbacks’ advocate with full attention and commitment (Fill, 2009). IMPLEMENTATION/EXECUTION The marketing communication mix applied by Cutbacks was very consistent between chosen tools and delivered message. Clearly, the combination of direct and digital marketing has made Cutbacks message spread perfectly among society. Using digital marketing was known as the most challenging but in turns most benefits if the company was successful.
It was because this kind of marketing at this time was booming among the young generation based on online platform with many tools helping them keep contacts together and share information to each other. If the company did right at the beginning, the population would go along with it during the time, but when there is something going wrong it would be failed by the extension of public shares. Regarding media tools, Cutbacks used limited means to convey its messages to customers including magazines, newspapers and billboards within six major cities in the U.
S, and all of these channels had connections to digital tools (social networks) (Dan, 2009). While newspapers and magazines were used to tell stories about the company, workers at Cutbacks and coffee beans as a form of informational message, billboard ads were recruited to display text-heave print ads to remind the prospects having in depth look at Cutbacks coffee bean roasting and selection process. Getting customer involvement into the campaign was a clever Meany’s outdoor print ads and being the first to post those shoots online.
It created a strong wave to make customers be a part of the campaign so that everyone would have fun and easy to accept Cutbacks’ message. Sentences appeared in the print ads with bold texts brought strong emotion to customers to consider Cutbacks as the best coffee in the world “Cutbacks or nothing”, “Beware” versus “Price”, or “Coffee” versus “Perfect” (picture below). Especially, the audiences were impressed most by the advertising phrase “If your coffee isn’t perfect, we’ll make it over. If it’s still not perfect, you must not be in a Cutbacks. Following the Sneak Peak discussion of Cutbacks people (Youth, 2009).
Not Just focusing on these messages, Cutbacks launched many videos on Youth at the same time with Cutbacks baristas talking about the importance of quality in its drinks (Youth, 2009). There were so many comments at each video for and even against but in general this campaign called wide attention from public. This execution of the campaign helped company change the audience attitudes through Electric models of advertising with the application of persuasion model and salience model (After Hall 1991, Maloney 1991 and Willie 2007 cited in Fill 2009).
This technique allowed Cutbacks employ customer affection by using heavy texts to emphasize brand image and products and made them remain connections to the company via social networks. (Source: Brand Republic) Furthermore, the implementation of Cutbacks on this campaign was to apply FCC grid in order to move the prospects considered Cutbacks coffee from habitual products to satisfaction aspect (Vaughn, 1980 cited in Fill, 2009).
Indeed, coffee is usually considered as medium to low involvement items that could have little effect on people feelings as they are easy to take a cup of coffee everywhere most invention as a daily drink, hence it belongs to thinking area rather than feeling one. The new ad campaign of Cutbacks raised a wave of strong emotion towards this brand thanks to its print ads and online activities trying to shift audiences to the part of feeling in the grid. Based on the rule of FCC grid, customers went through the process of Do-Feel-Learn to have complete satisfaction on Cutbacks coffee products.
RESULTS Measuring or evaluating campaign is one of important steps in marketing process in order to learn where the execution was right or wrong to better amend to fix with hanging environment. The effectiveness of Cutbacks campaign was not so hard to be measured since it used direct marketing technique with the combination of digital tools. It, therefore, is considered to be a very successful one that has been bringing large amount of loyal customers to Cutbacks based on the evaluation of online tools used – Faceable, Twitter and Youth (likes, shares, video views, photos posted, comments, etc. . This campaign continues to be run so far to keep daily contacts to customers and it is hence not easy to go for final results but partial achievements can e given. Faceable has been one of the most successful channels for Cutbacks to deliver their messages of social and daily activities with more than 30 million fans where approximate 184,000 of them discussing on Cutbacks Faceable page currently (2012). Taking a look back at the year of 2009, the company posted several topics on having nearly 25,000 “likes” with 8,300 comments and thousands shared (Faceable, 2012).
The successes of this campaign are not limited with Faceable but Youth and Twitter as well. Although the number of subscribers is not so high with 13,240 people until 2012, Youth has made great deals to have over 8. 5 million viewers. Cutbacks Twitter page although has modest numbers of followers with more than 2. 6 millions but this channel is considered as the main important one that help Cutbacks keep contacts to its customers through daily discussion on all topics relating to Cutbacks (Twitter, 2012).
Cutbacks twitter has new tweets every hour from customers all over the world and the company is doing very well in replying the audiences as soon as possible and that has made them happy to continue engaging with the brand. CONCLUSION This Cutbacks campaign has been proved as an exceeding outcome of social media so far especially with Twitter and surely the company is doing very well this way to continuously confirm their top quality of products, services as well as their extreme enthusiasm of doing social activities to connect people to get involved.
Every word from the community even to praise or to present unhappiness relating to the brand has been taken care so dearly with a very short time to satisfy customers as much as possible. With the combination of three strongest channels of all social networks with he support of print ads as well as outdoor ads, Cutbacks has successfully achieved the implementation of an integrated marketing communication campaign to provide a clear and consistent message to its audiences that completely focuses on “quality’.