How appealing is McCafe’s home brew?
After reading fellow classmate, Michelle Su’s blog Have your McCafe at home, the question of ‘how appealing this will be?’ popped into my head. In her blog, it stated that McDonald’s have recently introduced its popular coffee to shelves in grocery stores in Canada and summarises the company’s reasons behind this move.
Despite the positive prospects of McDonald’s introduction of packaged home brew coffee, I personally feel like this could be a risky move. The reasons are simple. Firstly, similar products such as, Starbucks home brew coffee, already exists. Therefore customers could already have preferences in the type of home brewed coffee they purchase. There are many points of parity (POP) with other home brew coffee, nevertheless, a point of difference (POD) could be that McCafe is relatively cheaper. Thus, McDonalds could use this POD to target a lower-end home brew coffee consumer market. Secondly, most customers would associate McCafe with lower-end products because it is a segment of McDonalds. More than 90% of caffeine fans make their own brew regularly (as outlined in Michelle’s blog). This market segment most likely has high standards for the quality of coffee and thus would not go for something like McCafe that is associated with lower-end and fast food. Because of these two reasons, McCafe should be careful with the market segments that it targets.
