Are coffee marketers the used car salespeople of our generation?

I've sneaked in the occasional rant about the saturated state of our domestic coffee industry and been guilty of drawing similarities between the current era and the gold rush period in the 1850s.

The market must show signs of maturing, consolidating, segmenting, regulating or reforming.

So, it's become a confusing array of commercial barrages to our senses.

We are subjected to unrelenting messages of buy, buy, buy, and BUY to keep volumes at levels that make an operation viable.

Every company seems to be working every angle, whether it's core or not, to their business - it's beginning to smell desperation.

In the break between Christmas and New Year, I thought about the year ahead with excitement - resolutions always present the opportunity to change the game or do things differently.

The contest is now hot, with competition snapping everywhere.

The most significant impact on the market has been the rise of small regional players and the associated pull they can attract in their local areas.

I started to think about what the future of the coffee universe might look like.

• Can single-serve portion control take over the market-leading position as consumers rank speed and convenience above pleasure and enjoyment,
• Do we expect logistics services to eventually fulfil the promise to enable a game changer on bricks and mortar retailers,
• Are there new undiscovered pieces of coffee innovation ripe for commercialisation? Just about all the ground has been tread upon by many elephants already.

I often look around at what everyone else is doing - sometimes, it's a bit of mindless late-night iPad time before the wave of tiredness hits.

Now, I have a pretty robust sense of humour, but upon reading the information contained in almost every website I visited, I was left rather dismayed at how lazy some companies had become, or I should say their copywriters are just blatantly pasting similar phrases pinched from other sites - even our content has been nicked many times over - rather hard not to get upset at all the imitators.

It was a homogenous blend of statements that all said or promised the same thing.

Where was the differentiation, the unique value proposition and the genuine attempt to help customers?

After reading the text, I was left with some questions. I needed to know the truth and confirm the accuracy of the information provided. This made me reflect deeply on our customer offering.

Some attempted to seduce you into placing an order, roasting and packing your order and sending it fast the same day.

Well, that promise of being able to do all that during business hours stretches the truth more than a little unless they were only processing a couple of small orders each day on roasters so small they are unlikely to sustain any coffee business for very long indeed.

In other words, it wasn't a trick to capture business.

All sorts of incentives were thrown at customers by sellers of imported coffee: free shipping, special volume discounts, extra packs, and even an eye-watering 2-for-1 deal.

These marketing actions are largely in response to a highly competitive and difficult market or the result of a company seeking to move rapidly deteriorating or distressed inventory, knowing they appeal to bargain hunters.

A well-spoken marketing phrase rings so very true in the coffee world - sell the sizzle, not the sausage.

At the pointy end of the premium food market worldwide- where you pay thousands of dollars for fine dining experiences, the emphasis is more on the story than the food - rare and exotic ingredients used to create something amazing - think Heston Blumenthal.

We see similar themes in the premium coffee segment here in Australia.

Elaborate stories about how coffee roasters travel to their origin, stand with the farmers picking cherries and carefully nurture the raw beans on special shipments before gently roasting those precious coffees to develop something unique.

The stories are becoming more than a little unrealistic.

Whilst there are genuinely passionate people in our industry who share similar beliefs and convictions to ourselves, people with a lot of "skin in the game" and who stand behind their product, I have to admit to an extreme dislike of the practice of putting competitors down to elevate their position.

It reeks of desperation and misrepresentation.

We already know that standards of coffee bean quality keep improving over time.

Great coffee is available almost anywhere these days. Hence, it's a simple matter of providing exceptional value, high levels of transparency and ensuring a freshness element (service) to keep building momentum.

Marketing coffee has become similar to flogging used cars - doing anything and everything to make a sale - which is a shame that market saturation has forced some to resort to these tactics.

In 2016, we plan to change the game so that our products and services become more like an experience.

The focus will be on how the customer can extract a better sense of enjoyment from their coffee.

Whether it's technical tips, helpful advice on choosing coffees or a broader range of beverage offerings beyond coffee, one thing is certain: it will be about you, the customer.