Starbucks, which has become a cultural symbol of American cities, has mushroomed along the commercial streets of big cities in China in recent years. Professionals who are in a hurry go in and look for vacancies between crowded laptops and folders, or they come out with a cup of take-away coffee in a hurry, which has become a common sight in office-intensive areas in cities.
No matter how much I admire the popularity of Starbucks in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, if someone suggests opening a Starbucks in a small town in southern China, I'm afraid the first reaction of most people is: impossible. The average price of a cup of coffee is above that of 20 yuan, which is equivalent to the daily diet budget of the mainstream people in most cities and towns. The threshold of consumption power makes cafes look so luxurious. In addition, people in third-and fourth-tier cities rarely have the habit of drinking coffee or even resist its taste, compared with urban people who are often exposed to European and American cultures. In the middle of their lifestyle, there is neither the need to find 15-30 minutes to relax in the intense work, nor the need for a large number of floating population to find a place to rest for a short time. It seems to be a conclusion that the town doesn't need a cafe.
However, this conclusion was broken by Dio, a local coffee chain company in China. It does not wait for people's consumption ability and psychology in third-and fourth-tier cities to gradually mature, but understands the differences in people's lifestyles in these markets and provides them with unique value. Here, it does not provide a space for busy white-collar workers to "untie their ties" for a moment, but provides a comfortable public place, a luxurious central square and an exotic street park for the middle class and the wealthy class with plenty of time to "tie their ties" and go to the meeting with pleasure.
Relying on this unique positioning, Dio Coffee has become the largest coffee chain brand in China in just eight years. More than 800 stores go deep into hundreds of towns, far exceeding the number of more than 200 Starbucks stores clustered in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, and the average single consumption amount is much higher than Starbucks.
Catering to consumer demand
Wang XX, the founder of Dio Coffee and a Taiwanese businessman, was once one of the shareholders of Ubc Coffee. In 1997, he and several partners invested in Ubc Coffee, which gradually extended to second-tier coastal cities such as Dongguan, Kunshan and Taishan in the form of chain operation. They saw that in the second-and third-tier cities at that time, people were so short of comfortable and quiet leisure places for business talks or dating couples that bosses had to go to star-rated hotels when they needed business meetings.
The emergence of Shangdao Coffee is to cater to such consumer demand. Consumers come to stores to consume, and their original intention is not purely functional demand, such as eating or drinking, but a spiritual demand. They need a space to feel the comfort of life. Therefore, Shangdao Coffee aims to create a good environment for consumers to eat, chat and relax.
Although later, due to different views on the future development, Wang XX withdrew from the business of going to the island, but the success of going to the island made Wang XX discover a consumer group different from the white-collar workers in first-tier cities who are always in a hurry and have no time to spend: around 30 years old, with certain spending power, expecting a comfortable and quiet place to relax, eat or drink coffee after work. Moreover, compared with Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and first-tier provincial capital cities, the number of such people in emerging cities in the third and fourth tier is not only more obvious, but also the services that can meet their needs are scarcer. Their pace of life is not so tense, and they have a lot of leisure time. The cafes, bars, western restaurants, clubs, cinemas and board games that abound in big cities are almost blank here. With the development of economy, the consumption power of mainstream people in third-and fourth-tier cities has reached the critical point of leisure and entertainment industry. People have the spare capacity and willingness to pay the cost for comfortable "murder time" besides meeting the basic needs of daily life.
Dio Coffee is precisely the market demand that came into being. In 200 1 year, Dio Coffee opened its first store in Qingpu, Shanghai, a suburb dozens of kilometers away from the center of Shanghai. Dio's location to avoid busy streets stems from its profit-making mode: Starbucks' profit point comes from the number of customers who come to the store for consumption, so opening the store in a conspicuous and crowded business district is the guarantee of obtaining sufficient passenger flow; Dio's main profit point comes from regular customers, who come here to enjoy life, so it pays more attention to whether the traffic around the store is convenient, there are enough parking spaces, and whether there are other supporting entertainment places (such as bars, KTV, etc.) that can bring each other more tourists. When considering the number of potential customers, they don't calculate the number of people on the street, but consider whether there are high-end houses, enterprises and institutions around them to determine whether the surrounding consumer groups have enough leisure or business needs.
With the rapid growth of economic scale in third-and fourth-tier cities, the return rate of investment in Diou stores is also much higher than the industry average. Wang XX joked that it is "like an era of profiteering". Under normal circumstances, the payback period of restaurants with an investment of 2 million to 3 million yuan is 3 years, while Diou's data is about 2 years on average. In the stores of third-and fourth-tier cities, most customers of Dio Coffee are not drunk, and few people come for the taste of coffee. For these consumers, Dio Coffee means that you can spend tens of dollars to enjoy a beautiful afternoon for two hours, and it carries their imagination of metropolitan people and modern lifestyles in Europe and America. Therefore, in order to meet their needs, Dio Coffee must also work hard outside the poem.
Meticulous service
Dio's store setting fully reflects the meticulous insight into customer needs. The interior style of Dio's store is not so much a coffee shop as a five-star hotel lobby or a luxury country club. The nearly 1,000-square-meter storefront is extremely open, and there will be no crowded scene like Starbucks at all. The baroque interior decoration, from wall hanging, oak table to comfortable sofa, shows a combination of American country and European court, which is most in line with Chinese people's imagination of exotic luxury. For consumers in third-and fourth-tier cities, this is undoubtedly very romantic.
In terms of service quality, Dio is also a standard for star-rated hotels. For example, when a customer takes a bus to the store, the waiter will come to help open the door when he gets off the bus; When the customer is two meters away from the door of the store, the doorman will take the initiative to pull the door for the guest, and a waiter will welcome him when he enters the door; There are more service details, for example, if the water level of the kettle is lower than 1/2, water should be added; When pouring water, you are required to lean sideways at the table to show courtesy; Once the ashtray has more than two cigarette butts, it should be replaced. On the customer's order card, the order time and delivery time are divided into two columns, and the delivery time of a pot of fresh fruit tea will definitely be within 8- 10 minutes, and so on. However, these investments in software and hardware are not intended to turn Dio into an excessive "luxury consumption", because consumers in third-and fourth-tier cities are generally "pragmatic first" in judging consumption value, so reasonable and friendly prices are one of the key elements for success in such a market. In the words of Wang XX, "We hope to serve our customers with a five-star standard and decorate them with a four-star style, because the former has too much investment, and with a three-star charging standard, our customers feel that they are worth the money."
In order to be meticulous in details, Dio has a very strict franchise management system, including what curtains, lighting, sofas, coffee prices, distribution methods of raw materials, service models and norms. Because it was found that the quality of sofas purchased by franchisees in different places was uneven, in order to make stores all over the country meet the joining standards in decoration, Dio had to set up his own furniture factory to manufacture sofas and other furniture for franchisees. Dio applied for eight patents on decoration, such as the fabric and pattern of sofa and the horizontal bar of bathroom.