Find out more about The Coffee Emporium's award-winning brand transformation

QSR Media got a chance to talk to the people behind The Coffee Emporium about their recent award-winning brand transformation, the challenges involved in undergoing such a change, as well as their vision for the brand's future.

The Coffee Emporium was founded back in 1991 in Bankstown, New South Wales. The brand offers premium quality coffee, made with freshly ground beans for each order, as well as a wide array of dishes ranging from savory to sweet. The Coffee Emporium is also the recipient of the 2016 QSR Media Detpak Award for Best Brand Transformation.

QSR MEDIA: Can you tell us more about your brand's recent transformation? What changed?

THE COFFEE EMPORIUM: We went through a significant review of our operations and marketing. We noticed there were opportunities we needed to seize in order to remain an attractive option for our existing and prospective franchise partners and, perhaps just as important, our guests. Our brand transformation involved the complete revamping of our website and of our coffee house fit-outs.

We also established a comprehensive 12-month marketing calendar designed to have limited time offers rolled-out during key dates across the year. We also implemented social media best practices across the organisation. As a premium brand, we had to evolve with the times to remain relevant and top-of-mind. In addition, our food and beverage menus were augmented to incorporate options for breakfast, lunch and, in some coffee houses, even dinner.

Finally, we have also invested a substantial amount of time in the development of sound processes and procedures that guide our franchise partners on the daily delivery of a remarkable coffee house experience. Once franchise partners join our brand they go through a meticulous 4-week training program encapsulating everything from latte art to guest experience.

QSR MEDIA: What were the challenging aspects of the transformation for the brand?

THE COFFEE EMPORIUM: One of the most challenging aspects we faced was challenging the status quo to really disrupt the prevailing mind-set. We needed to bring people along on the journey to take the brand to the next level through implementation of game changing strategies focused on accelerating growth. Change management is always hard because people are so set in their ways. We have done a lot of work with our franchise partners to get them engaged and aligned with our vision, mission and values. Every opportunity we have with them counts. We have rolled-out a series of workshops throughout the year aimed at adding value to our franchise partners and their team members.

In addition, our Support Office team have also been great at adding further value to our franchise partners through store visitations and one-on-one meetings. The above initiatives were fundamental in helping us pave the way to our brand transformation which came to life through the implementation of new coffee house fit-outs, a new state-of-the-arts website, marketing campaigns, new food and beverage menus and our training program.

QSR MEDIA: How critical is a team?

THE COFFEE EMPORIUM: Our team is critical to our brand transformation success story. Daniel Isaac joined the brand as Group General Manager mid 2014 with the purpose of setting the strategic direction and new growth plans for the brand. In addition to our amazing existing team members, we appointed Fernando Pimentel as Global Marketing Manager in 2015. Fernando has been instrumental in leading our Marketing team to fully support our franchise partners through the development and implementation of marketing campaigns aimed at enhancing brand awareness and generating great product trial opportunities that will ultimately bring in new consumers to The Coffee Emporium. Mellisa Molenaar joined The Coffee Emporium as our Business Development Manager to strengthen the support to our franchise partners. She has been providing great level of support to our franchise partners at a coffee house level, focusing on building top-line sales, optimising profitability and protecting the brand through consistency and alignment. Finally, Simone Thomas has joined our team as National Franchise Recruitment Manager to give further focus on our growth plans. We are very excited to see our team grow as we look forward to a promising future for our brand. 

QSR MEDIA: Any big plans you have before the year ends?

THE COFFEE EMPORIUM: 2016 marks an important milestone in our brand’s history with the celebration of our 25th Anniversary taking place in November. We are very proud to be part of the lives of many Australians who daily visit our multiple coffee houses nationally. To celebrate this we are introducing a brand new food menu to all our coffee houses across Australia. Food has become an increasingly key component for The Coffee Emporium enabling our franchise partners to continuously enhance their top-line sales through incremental average dollar ticket per transaction.

We are also looking forward to a brand new and exciting season with the Western Sydney Wanderers Football Club. As proud sponsors of WSW’s membership base, we have multiple opportunities to communicate our brand to a highly passionate and loyal group of followers many of whom are also guests of The Coffee Emporium. We have also noticed many new faces visiting our coffee shops driven by deals and offers exclusive to Western Sydney Wanderers’ members. The 2016-2017 A-League season is certainly going to be an amazing one with many new marketing and branding initiatives scheduled to take place.

We are also currently discussing opportunities for international expansion with new Master Franchisors for China and Malaysia. We are certainly very proud and excited with what will happen from now until the end of the year. So, be sure to watch this space.

QSR MEDIA: What would you like to tell the market about the direction of your brand?

THE COFFEE EMPORIUM: The Coffee Emporium is to continue this transformation through development of other aspects of the business. We have some ambitious goals planned for the next 3 years that involve domestic and global expansion. We are very confident in our strategy and know that the only constant thing in this life is change. We are not afraid of change. To quote a famous philosopher “The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.” We encourage all our franchise partners to embrace it as we know this is the only way moving forward.