National Coffee Day... a very flat occasion
Posted: Friday 30 September, 2011
Georgina Dunkley
Yesterday the World celebrated ‘National Coffee Day’ - another hallmark celebration designed to make sales and promote brands; these days are now ten-a-penny and include a wide range of food stuffs, consumer products and local initiatives. But are they really that effective in the UK? As a non-coffee drinker, a day dedicated to coffee would never really be of that much interest and worth to me, but as a PR person it is still relevant and interesting to see whether there is any PR mileage in piggybacking onto these awareness days.
Well National Coffee Day certainly wasn’t a resounding success in the UK, in fact I wouldn’t have known anything about it had I not be informed by my coffee-mad colleague, Erica. Even when we visited Starbucks at lunchtime the barista seemed surprised of the day’s mention. In the States, however, it couldn’t be more different. Simply by googling the day I was inundated with articles from leading US publications including the Washington Post, CBS News and MyFox Philadelphia. So what’s the difference? Is our media more sophisticated to cutting edge news, do American’s love coffee more than us or did the UK coffee brands just not realise the day existed?
Either way it probably would have made sense for the UK contingent of coffee brands to make more of an effort through both traditional PR channels and social media platforms – deals and promotions always need a news hook and this may just have been the one they needed!
