ProjectsNew experiences and service models for coffee lovers
Analysing the customer journey of Lavazza A Modo Mio to envision new service opportunities that could improve and expand customer acquisition and loyalty.
How to build a distinctive and memorable experience around an everyday commodity? What features and moments could keep the customers in the loop, in a market characterized by huge competition and decreasing margins?
We started by framing an extensive and detailed map of the as-is experience for Lavazza A Modo Mio consumers, and compared it with the product, services and experiences provided by competitors. Building on emerging insights, opportunities and key drivers, we identified a set of ideas and initiatives that Lavazza could experiment with.
Among the various ideas co-designed along the project, the subscription model emerged as a promising scenario to build a longer-term relationship with Lavazza customers, and shift the focus from purely single-serve to a broader perspective on coffee-related products and experiences.
Preparing and drinking coffee is dense with routine and habitual gestures for most of us.
In this project, we had the opportunity to uncover meanings and needs around this ritual, with the goal of identifying opportunities that could make a service experience around it more distinctive and contemporary. Our starting point has been foundational and extensive research combining qualitative and quantitative techniques (service safari, diary study, digital ethnography, online surveys), aimed at understanding every moment of the as-is journey of single-serve consumers.
As a result, we identified a set of key behavioral drivers around coffee consumption, that helped us frame and analyze specific expectations and gaps in current experiences. The behavioural drivers, together with the comprehensive and detailed analysis of Lavazza AMM's customer journey, represented the starting point to imagine new types of experiences. Those initial stimuli and inspirations were then used to facilitate two co-design sessions in Milan and Naples, hosted in temporary dedicated spaces ("Future Coffee Experience Room") to open the ideation process and involve coffee and single-serve consumers. Lot of ideas emerged, from supporting people in finding the perfect blend for their daily breaks, to identifying media partnerships that could enrich the tasting moment.
All the ideas converged into a catalogue of validated solutions and initiatives, shaping the vision of the to-be experience.
A key insight from the research was that most single-serve consumers actually drink coffee in a variety of ways - based on the moment of the day, where they are and what they are looking for. Based on this insight, we started to consider the idea of an expanded set of coffee products that could support customers having their favourite blends ready for single-serve machines, moka or other brewing methods - no matter what they choose in a given moment. Those considerations led to the idea of a subscription-based experience, that could help curious customers expanding even more their perspective on coffee products and preparations, by receiving thematic boxes containing all their coffee supply for the week/s, together with additional accessories and stories. The last step was designing how the subscription model could work, both in terms of narratives and value propositions towards the customer, and in terms of specific moments of interaction and touchpoints.
Through prototypes and iterative experiments, we moved from exploring different value propositions to designing, testing and validating the core features of the new subscription-based experience in the US and Italian market.
