When is a hot chocolate not a hot chocolate? A marketing lesson from Stockwell Girl Guides
Every Tuesday, for the last 10 years, I’ve left work on time (nearly on time), pulled on a blue hoodie, put on a heavy rucksack carrying all manner of things, and set off for Stockwell where I run a Girl Guide unit in a gloomy mouse filled church-hall.
With years of experience, I think I’m a pretty good judge of what the girls will enjoy doing, and why they’ll enjoy it.
So last week, we confidently set-off on a ‘Quest’, to find and take a selfie of three blue plaques in Clapham, with the promise of a reward of a hot choc if they were successful.
Hot Chocolate.
What’s not to like?!
The girls have a sweet tooth, it was a coldish night, so I thought a successful evening was in the bag.
Trouble started when we couldn’t find one of the plaques on our route and time started ticking away. The grumbles began when it was suggested we might have to postpone the treat until the following week.
It continued, when in whiney voices, they started going on and on and on about where we would be getting the hot chocolate from – only Starbucks would do.
And then, when my patience was at breaking point, they turned into proper Veruca Salts demanding Frappuccino no less!
By now I was properly irritated. The hot chocolate was a treat, I probably wouldn’t remember to claim the money back for them, and all they could do was moan.
When we got to Starbucks (selfies x3 complete), I asked the Guides to wait outside while I ordered their drinks, and explained I would bring them out to them as 12 quite lively girls inside would create a bit of chaos for those trying to work on laptops, enjoy a quiet chapter, or a natter over a coffee with a friend.
You guessed it. More moaning.
I was only millimetres away from sacking the whole thing off.
It was only the following week that I realised I had totally missed what was really happening.
As the girls arrived, they told a couple of Guides who had missed the previous week what they had done.
They’d been to Starbucks! Yep, Starbucks for the first time! The American (teen) dream! They had taken the paper cups home, and had carefully reused them all week! They still had them kept safely in their bedrooms!
No, they hadn’t been allowed a Frappuccino, or to order it themselves and get their name written on a cup.
But still!
‘Starbucks! It was like being an American teenager! You should have been there!’
And then the penny dropped. The hot chocolate wasn’t the thing at all. It was getting a piece of aspirational American teen sophistication. It was feeling grown-up, cosmopolitan, people of the world. Being part of something that they had only previously experienced through the big, small or really small screen. It was sneakers and malls and cheerleaders.
And I had missed it.
I had been so sure I understood them, I didn’t listen. I didn’t hear what they were trying to tell me. I hadn’t spotted that there was something much more exciting at play than the drink itself.
And as a marketer, it was a bit of a wake call for me:
- I shouldn’t have underestimated the emotional power of a brand.
- I should have realised that things move fast, and what was appealing a couple of years ago may not be as appealing just 18 months later.
- I should have known not only to listen, but to really listen so that I could understand and interpret not only what they were saying, but why they were saying it.
Feeling terrible that I had ruined what was clearly a ‘moment’ in their growing up, I apologised and explained that we wouldn’t have had time to queue and all order different drinks, but that we could go back in the summer for a Frappuccino, as after all that might be a better season for an iced coffee.
‘Iced coffee?!’ they squealed. ‘Is that what it is?! No thanks, that sounds dis-gust-ing’.
Zoe Harris is group marketing director at Trinity Mirror