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Marketing the Micro-Roastery

Marketing your micro-roasting operation begins and ends with one simple strategy: providing your customers with perfectly roasted beans so they can enjoy the experience of a great cup of coffee.

Of course, to start at the beginning and arrive at the end implies the existence of a middle ... and it's the middle where micro-roasters are experiencing the sorrows and joys of the micro-roasting marketing learning curve.

Several years ago, Lourdes Tallet became such a permanent fixture at a Philadelphia roastery/café that the owner asked her if she'd like a job. Tallet was taking some time off from attending the University of Pennsylvania, and said yes to waiting tables at one of the few retail/roastery establishments of its time. When the owner sold the café part of the business, she went with him and started doing the roasting. Ownership of a roastery followed a few years later when she and three friends decided they wanted out of city life. They went looking for a place to move to where they could also open a roastery. Northampton, Mass., was the place.

Indigo Coffee Roasters opened up in September 1989; now nearly 14 years later, it's an established business in the New England community, with its two owners, Tallet and Florence Campanile relying on word-of-mouth advertising, some well-placed radio sponsorships, and most importantly, Indigo's service and quality to grow the business.

"When we started in 1989 we had nothing but time on our hands, so we chose some geographical areas that we felt would have potential customers. We roasted different coffees, made up sample boxes with our catalog and price sheet info, grabbed our map and set out to do cold calls," says Tallet. Not surprisingly, these cold calls were the least favorite part of their business. Once they had developed a solid customer base, they, for the most part, stopped the sales trips.

"Now we run strictly on word-of-mouth," says Tallet. A sponsorship of a regional morning radio show in the past year has grounded them even more to the regional community. As a sponsor of the show, Indigo's name is mentioned along with the added benefit of an announcement of the different stores where Indigo's coffees are available.

Tallet says that although they have no set budget for marketing (this is true of the other micro-roasters as well), they've spent money on the business-to-business yellow pages in New England, Boston and New York City, but has yet to hear that someone heard of them through those venues. As far as a Web site goes, Indigo does not have one currently, although that is in the roastery's near future. Of her plans for e-commerce, Tallet says, "We're not primarily directed to the end consumer, and when someone does e-mail us an order I find I want to talk with them anyway. I can understand the convenience of finding information on the Web, and that's why we need to do this. But because the e-commerce isn't driving us, it didn't seem quite as pressing."

Additional marketing for Indigo Coffee Roasters involves ads in the SCAA conference kit, numerous in-kind donations to non-profit groups and events, and sponsoring a coffee break at the SCAA show in Boston. "We've been fortunate that we keep experiencing steady growth through word-of-mouth," says Tallet. And at the bottom of the coffee cup, it's still the coffee that counts. As Carolina Coffee Company's Jody White says, "When you do coffee extremely well, it in and of itself is a marketing program. You can have the most well thought-out marketing plan in the world, but if your coffee isn't good, you may get some quick hits, but they're not going to hold."

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