The world is divided, whether caffeine is better than
theine or not, many studies are willing to take part of this debate.
Only for your curiosity, coffee is the second biggest
production worldwide after petroleum, with 7,386 million tones per year. The
biggest producer is Brazil following by Columbia.
In parallel, 4,1 million tones of tea are produced per
year, from which the biggest producer remains China.
Even if French people are more into coffee than tea,
this market is growing up every year and is becoming a serious competitor for
coffee brands.
Let’s now compare strategies between two luxury coffee
brands such as Nespresso and Carte d’Or with two luxury tea brands such as
Mariages Frères and Kusmi Tea.
As we all know Nespresso is the leader in the coffee
market and was the first to develop coffee machines with pods. Nespresso has
always positioned itself on the luxury market, opening specialised stores in
many famous cities. In fact this brand is still the only one absents from
supermarkets. Their strategy is to stay rare, and create needs. However, many
competitors have developed pods that can be used in Nespresso machines, and
since then, they are losing market share. Indeed, a brand such as Carte d’Or is
also positioning itself as a luxury coffee brand but has a wide range of
products in supermarkets.
Paradoxically, the big trend in coffee is pods, all
brands are developing machines and pods with many flavour. However, on the tea
market it is the other way around, teabags exist for a long time and luxury
brands are willing to end teabags and to sell tea in nice boxes, to get back to
the authenticity of tea. Mariages Frères as well as Kusmi Tea sell its
different teas in boxes. We can also analyse that Tea brands are more and more
developing specialised stores and are not selling their products in
supermarkets. Whereas, except from Nespresso, coffee brands are offering wide
ranges in supermarkets but are not developing specialised stores.
Even if we could admit that tea and coffee have very
similar values and are consumed almost at the same moment of the day, it is
strictly two different markets with different consumer needs.
It should be noted that some coffee machines brands
(Tassimo) are surfing on the Tea rising success and are offering tea pods to
use with coffee machines. It is not really a competition for tea brands as they
are producing tea pods from existing tea brands (Twinings).
As a conclusion, tea and coffee are:
• Two different beverages
• Two different way of consumption
• Two different marketing strategies
There is a competition from them both to gain market
share but coffee drinkers and tea drinkers are very different consumers and it
is difficult for a tea brand to attract coffee lovers and same for the other
way around.
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