Content Marketing Today

Yes, You Can Beat the Big Guys: Thanksgiving Relaunch for Maxwell House May the Last Good Drop

Customers don’t experience much content in Maxwell House marketing.
While at Starbucks it’s all about the content of customer experience.

“Our consumers are optimists. They see the cup as half full,” says Jerry Densk, director of marketing for Kraft’s mainstream coffee category. “We’re offering them the best cup of Maxwell House ever made.” (MediaPost, November 21, 2007)

This, of course, begs the question: what kind of swine swill were you serving your customers before you reformulated your coffee? “Our consumers are optimists.They see the cup is half full.”   What the heck does that mean?  As a marketing message, that’s just piling cliché upon cliché. It conveys absolutely no meaning whatsoever.

Sadly, this once great brand has been left in the dust by Starbucks. They perfected in person content marketing that motivates millions of us to spend way too much of a cup of coffee  in one of their cozy retail stores. Not only do we overpay for a cup of coffee but we are  willing to wait in line to  do it. It’s safe to say that nobody is  going  to stand in line to buy a can of Maxwell House.

This is truly a case of a giant company failing to wake up and smell the coffee…Well, to wake up and smell seismic shifts in the coffee market.  Kraft had decades to observe what Starbucks was doing. Just as Sears and JCPenney were sound asleep while while Wal-Mart grew from one small store in a tiny town in Arkansas to become a monster retailer, so too did Kraft ignore a cultural phenomenon.  There’s a lot to learn from from the accelerating decline of a once great brand.

Maxwell House plunges. Starbucks skyrockets

I’m going to pay a fortune for that coffee concoction.

Americans generally are drinking less coffee. They are also buying more at specialty retailers and less in the supermarkets where Maxwell House and Procter & Gamble’s Folgers brands still dominate.  But market share is shrinking particularly for Maxwell House.  Since 2002 its share of the  ground  coffee market has plunged from 22.4% to 16% in 2007.  At the same time premium priced Starbucks ground coffee is grown in market share from 8.1% to 10.5%. (Chicago Tribune, November 9, 2007) Both Maxwell House and Folgers are in pretty serious market share trouble.  In fact, it’s rumored that Kraft will dump Maxwell House under pressure by a major shareholder. 

“This is probably the biggest launch, the biggest innovation and product news we have had in 10 years,” said Jerry Densk, Kraft’s director of mainstream coffee.(Chicago Tribune, November 9, 2007) Unless he’s kidding about the biggest thing, I think the Maxwell House brand will be doomed because of long-term neglect and a relaunch that misses the mark by a mile.

Here are some lame elements of the Thanksgiving relaunch of the Maxwell House brand:

• They talk about the coffee tasting much better now.  Wasn’t it supposed to taste great before this? Who’s going to believe it?
• They are giving away free packets of coffee at toll booths around the US. Now that makes for a terrific coffee experience–a small packet of coffee that you cannot brew while you’re driving and the kids are fighting in the backseat.
• They are going to contribute a tiny amount of money–up to $100,000, according to MediaPost–to America’s Second Harvest.That’s nice but the amount is so small as to be meaningless.
• They are going to have kiosks at 15 shopping malls across United States on Black Friday to give away more free coffee.This seems like a pretty small effort in a country with thousands of shopping malls.

Marketing Lessons to Learn

What Kraft missed was the element of customer experience which enabled Starbucks to create a mystique around the drinking of their whole rainbow of  complicated coffee concoctions. Here are the lessons we can learn a small business people from the Maxwell House debacle:

• You can outfox a large competitor by going where they’re not in doing what they have forgotten how to do.
• You will probably have more time than you think because billion-dollar companies are frequently slow to respond–think about Microsoft almost missing the Internet.
• You can start small and own a niche as Starbucks did in Seattle, even if you don’t choose a world domination path.
• You can use a content marketing strategy–and in person variety for Starbucks–that can achieve an impact your larger competitor may not be able to match.

Will the Maxwell House relaunch work? I’m not sure but, as for me, I’m going to be sitting in Starbucks sipping a latte rather than grabbing a small packet of their ‘improved blend’ from a tollbooth attendant on my way to grandma’s house for Thanksgiving.