Welcome to our Journey
In the context of the workshops of the “Advertising and Public Relations” Lab of the Department of Communication, Media and Culture of Panteion University of Political and Social Sciences, we were invited to split into groups and create our own start-up companies. Our team, therefore, consists of 5 students, Zoe Karvela, Maria Agiovlasiti, Rodica Moroi, Charis Skarlatos, Christina Giannopoulou. Coming together, we exchanged ideas and opinions, combined talents and spent time together working on projects and getting to know each other better. Our start-up is called TrendIT, and along with our motto “Setting trends daily!”, we support our message that we come up with ideas and make the most out of them.
So, in the first course of workshops we collaborated with professionals in the field of marketing, advertising and applications. As a start-up, we worked on two major projects and as individual members on a smaller one. The two group projects were about the Costa Coffee company and a Heuristic Evaluation of a site of our choice, while in the third, we each made our own mobile quiz app. After we submitted and presented our projects, the experts gave us feedback for our better development!
So, LET’S GET STARTED!
Our team was invited among other teams to undertake the role of an advertising and marketing agency. We had the opportunity to work on a real brief of a client given by Despina Papa,Senior Brand Manager Coffee, CEE at the Coca-Cola Company, and present our marketing research and advertising proposal for Costa Coffee’s new campaign. We had the opportunity to gain important knowledge from our mentors Diana Birba, Mark Aris and Lina Bakalexi who were always there to consult us and give us the feedback we needed.
Initially, we conducted primary and secondary research through a questionnaire and in-depth interviews. We, also, studied the main competitors in the coffee industry.
On the questionnaire part, we collected 150 responses in a short period of time without any particular difficulties. From the respondents’ answers, we observed that coffee consumers attach great importance to the taste and quality of the coffee which they obtain, mainly, from the supermarket. What is more, respondents tend to place particular emphasis on the sensations that coffee gives them.
A large percentage of them claimed that Costa Coffee needs to improve the advertising and promotion of its products because the majority of consumers seem to be mostly informed by social media platforms.
The results helped us to later create our advertising proposal without any significant difficulty. However, due to the fact that the responses we received were, mainly, from people aged 18–25, we chose to conduct in-depth interviews with people aged 30–32 as this was our client’s target audience. We interviewed both a person who knew and had tried products of the company before, and a person who did not know and had not tried it yet, just to get a look at both perspectives and consuming habits. We did not hold focus groups because we did not have the opportunity to find a sufficient number of people who would have given us appropriate answers and were a part of the age group we were interested in. Subsequently, we proceeded to a secondary investigation of Costa Coffee’s competitors in which we did not encounter any problems.
TrendIT selected Nescafe, Coffee Island and Nespresso and studied them for their USPs, Reason to believe, Competitive edge on brand & Product level and Communication Strategy. Moreover, we placed the competitors in a category map where on the vertical axis we put the taste and on the horizontal axis the promotion of each company. We saw that Nespresso was in the first place followed by Coffee Island and Nescafe with equally good promotion.
To better understand our product and the company in general, our team conducted a SWOT analysis, focusing more on Costa Coffee’s opportunities. The only challenge we faced in this part was that there were not enough Greek sources of information about the company and most of the articles were related to its operations abroad. We moved on to the analysis of the company’s 4Ps, making some suggestions for improving Costa Coffee’s promotion and place of products. Our recommendations also reach many young people precisely since we thought that the company should expand its target group’s age range. Taking into consideration the results of our questionnaire and the youth of the majority of our respondents, we wanted to include all age groups to our recommendations and, overall, campaign to make everyone feel included. This is why a lot of recommendations for place and promotion included the expansion in more online markets and digital platforms.
A crucial step to our strategy was the creation of an advertising campaign that focused, mostly, on Costa Coffee’s premium taste and quality. Taking into account that our goal as an advertising agency was to make the company more known to the public, and result in its dominance in the “at-home” coffee consumption categories, we used sensory marketing as our top way to get through our message.
What is Sensory Marketing you may ask?
Sensory Marketing is a potent tool that aims to appeal to at least one of the five senses in order to prompt significant, positive and profitable responses from a business’ main target audience. It provides a more special and memorable experience to its target market.
What was our BIG IDEA and, overall, Communication Strategy?
We used the people’s five senses to achieve subconscious communication with our target group and create situations that consumers could match with Costa Coffee. We thought of the motto “Costa Coffee: A senseful experience” to accompany the content that we were going to upload to all social media platforms. To point out the importance of each sense, we gave it its own moment to shine by creating a matching hashtag for each. For sound, we had #hearit, for smell #smellit, for sight #observeit, for touch #feelit, and, lastly, for taste we had #tasteit. All these hashtags and material were used for our social media coverage, and, in combination with a TV and media advertising spot, we aimed to encourage consumers to try out and get to know the brand and its products. Especially for our advertising concept, this included the process of making coffee at home by two people that have different routines, lives and a way to drink their coffee in the comfortness of their home. The special thing about the idea was that, while each person was making its coffee, all of the five senses were starting to activate, resulting in the best possible enjoyment of the whole process.
As an advertising agency we tried really hard to take into consideration all the requirements that our client’s brief had and the results of our primary research, and wondered how we could go beyond what was asked of us to do. This is why we made an important effort to create a professional, pleasant and up-to-date content for our agency’s and Costa Coffee’s social media platforms.
IT DOESN’T END THERE!
Keep on reading to find out about our next project
We had the honor to welcome two special guests in one of our classes, whose specialty is related to the user experience, usability, and accessibility review of interfaces. We were lucky enough to meet Panagiotis Zaharias and Antonis Mpirmpas, who taught us about the world of UX and the design process review of an interface, the problems that a specialist can face, and the methodology of heuristic evaluation. At the end of the session, we got assigned to proceed with an evaluation of a website ourselves, and the one we chose is the website of Akis Petretzikis.
Why Akis’ website?
The reason why we chose to put Akis Petretzikis’ site at the center of our analysis has to do with him being one of the most successful and influential chefs in Greece, who managed to make a name for himself from a really young age. We wanted to examine the way that his official website was put together. During the course, we were suggested as a team to work with a website that we had never visited before, or weren’t really familiar with, in order to keep our analysis pure and objective. The website we chose to examine satisfies the previous requirement. Akis’ website includes a great deal of his easy-to-cook recipes and his e-shop. Our Heuristic evaluation breaks down the structure of the website in order to examine the usability of the user interface.
In order to achieve our goal, we developed an evaluation process, which contained the tasks we undertook to examine, such as “Sign In”, “Shop Examination”and “Looking for recipes”. We also created a persona as the website’s user and some possible scenarios that determined her activity. We, finally, created a ranking system from 0–4 (0: Effective — 4: Disastrous) so we can measure each finding . The fact that the evaluation process was done by our whole team helped us understand the task better, and also get the chance to help one another by explaining and discussing the assignment. Up next, we proceeded with the distribution of the tasks to each member. Lastly, we set a deadline, and we got to work! Crucial role to this step played the fact that the examination of the website’s interface happened individually by our team’s members which gave us the opportunity to evaluate the project from different angles facing different challenges.
Building a website’s Heuristic Evaluation was one of the most difficult tasks for our team since we had never come in touch with a UX task before. More specifically, we had to dig deep into the well- constructed website, in order to come up with negative findings which would fit in our analysis, something that was really challenging for us.
What were our positive findings?
The positive findings of our evaluation were found easily with the help of our guests’ study material. Moreover, this website had to be full of user-friendly features, since as we’ve mentioned, it is a very famous website. From the sign-in step to the first look at the homepage, we can easily say that the process was easy and understandable, following the standards of both recipe and shopping websites. Regarding the recipes section, there was a search bar that helped the user to generate or to look for something specific. When someone would click on a recipe, this was shown clearly, while also containing clickable circles and squares for the steps and the ingredients to be checked respectively. This feature helped the user to cook freely, without having to try and recall his last steps. As for the shopping section, the products for sale are easily visible with nice and clear product photos. The add-to-cart process was also meeting our expectations. This could be shown from the fact that, when removing an item from the cart, the user would receive an error prevention pop-up (Do you want to remove this item?) in case the step was made by accident. Furthermore, it is important to mention that the website contains a Web Accessibility icon, which includes people with disabilities, such as dyslexia. The website, in general, made the navigation easier for the users by describing each page they were on or the steps they followed, and providing information. It had nice colors and, surely, provided the essential information in order to cook a delicious meal.
Were there any negative findings?
As far as the negative findings are concerned, we have the visibility of the system status issue. More specifically, while looking at the “Sign In” and “My cart” icons, it was hard to figure out their meaning. Call to action buttons, such as “Sign In” and “My cart”, could be the key to fix this trivial issue. The website has to offer two language options (Greek and English), but switching the language option to Greek would not get all the phrases translated, resulting in the exclusion of some users, who are not familiar with English phrases, from enjoying a smoother user experience. Furthermore, the “Favorites” icon should be placed at the top right corner of the website for the purpose of facilitating the user’s activity, since this is the common location for this icon to be. Another negative finding was the lack of error prevention signs and notices. More specifically, while scanning and looking for recipes, we exited the page in the middle of the process and we did not face any error prevention note. An error message towards the user would be helpful if the user pressed the button by accident. One more issue we faced, during our analysis, had to do with the “Sign In” process. To be more accurate, a member of our team tried to login via Facebook and faced an error without an effective solution, resulting in the failure and non-achievement of the desirable task. As far as a more minimal design is concerned, unavailable products could be removed from the eshop, since they cannot be purchased by the user. The user interface could be more helpful towards the user, with a “Frequently Asked Questions’’ button shown in a more obvious place.
Consequently, we examined the website interface and showed our positive and negative findings. Moving forward with our analysis, we gave our recommendations and points for improvement which could benefit the users and their experience, if they were to be implemented by the website.
Don’t stop now… you haven’t read our last project!
On our last project, we were requested to individually build a mobile quiz app under the guidance of Magy Kontou, Co-Founder and Lead Product & UI/UX Designer. During the two sessions, we talked about the process of creating and publishing an application. The stages of analysis, design, implementation, test, and, lastly, publishing, were explained in detail with examples and suggested tools. Particular importance was given to the Proto.io tool, prototyping for all, which formed the framework for the design of our applications. By using it, we built a themed application consisting of three questions with right and wrong answers.
We, also, faced many challenges in this task, mainly due to our unfamiliarity with the tool. Nevertheless, we were able to overcome them and deliver a creative result that expressed each of us to the fullest.
Special thanks to Betty Tsakarestou and Dr. Stavros Kaperonis for all these amazing and unique opportunities.
You made it! You read all the way to the end!
