Zondar! Nerds in Food Land

Toby’s Estate was 2007s winner of the ‘how long is my $1 coffee queue competition’ but they had their ass kicked this year by Cafe Hernandez, enhorabuena! Why do people wait 20 mins for a coffee? Addiction? Not really it was everywhere… Good coffee? Yeah and coolness.

Not big brand hype. Word of mouth & coolness have worked for the Hernandez family and their 24 hour coffee shop… Gentrification of the Potts Point location has helped.

Build a brand in the cafe industry, on cool, quality & word of mouth. Certainly not on glamorous logos, I struggled to find an example at the stall to take a photo & snapped this from the top of a menu card.

The coffee scene is like clubbing. Make yourself cool by having a long queue of agitated customers full of buzz, someone out of the scene won’t know what it’s about and is likely to queue up. And like the Hernandez queue, when you get to the front you must be rewarded.

The buzz you’d expect at a caffine party, big buzz, not so much hype though… Why would people get out there & spread their gear without giving their brand any… ‘jujjjjj’?

The Rocks was decked out with stalls all shaded with the same tacky plastic non-descript white blankness. From a distance they looked the same. Punters have to walk right up to a tent to work out what it was for. Isn’t this the big event for the year, the big chance to big-up your crew’s brew?

Is it an all pull marketing industry? Craft a delicious product then hang out and wait til its demanded? We know that’s not true although brands that play like that were noticeably absent (Starbucks and McCafe come to mind) .

Mission: dig up some kind of visual representation of the brands hidden under those white plastic generic display tents, take a snap and stick on flickr.