“Why get free coffee when you could buy Tim Hortons instead?”
Recently, the CUS brought free coffee for students in the lounge in order to prepare us for finals, so I was shocked to see that many classmates were still lining up for Tim Hortons.
Sue-O Lee, author of SSSNMN, mentioned to me that this was due to us being creatures of habit, and that he usually prefers the taste after it’s been payed for. Although this seems illogical, it’s true. Somehow, coffee does taste better when you pay for it; it’s like a reward for your hard work.
From a marketing perspective, it looks like Tim Hortons is just really good at creating strong relationships with their customers!
Although there are only 2 Tim Hortons on campus, they dominate UBC’s main mall. I counted the amount of Tim Hortons cups vs. Starbucks cups near the Sauder building, and Tim Hortons won 67:23. There were also 15 regular coffee cups, which can be bought from any UBC standard cafe.
In the past few days, we’ve been learning about online marketing. And Tim Hortons hasn’t been doing any marketing online whatsoever. On Twitter, Tim Hortons has 1,075 tweets, and 1,005 followers. In comparison, Starbucks has 8,947 tweets, and 1,854,739 followers. [as of November 29, 2011 1:50 PM]
How is this possible? If they aren’t using QR codes, tweets, and other social media toys, what makes them so successful? Feel free to leave a comment at the bottom, saying what you think the success factors are.
Matt
I liked it when you mentioned my name. It was very insightful. It’s interesting why people buy things instead of getting them for free. I’ll make a blog post about it.
sueolee
9 Dec 11 at 4:38 pm