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Branding Consultants on Caffeine:
Kraft names new coffeemaker Tassimo but don't use it if you're having company.

Just call me Tassimo. I only know how to brew one cup of coffee. And you will pay dearly for the experience.

Kraft, owner of Maxwell House, the coffee only your grandmother can drink, is apparently following Starbucks into your kitchen with a sleek new coffeemaker. You'd better find a place to hide fast. Naming it Tassimo, they are aiming at a new category called single serve coffee. Just want one cup of fresh joe? Now there's a dedicated machine on your kitchen counter just itching to help. It's about nursing that cup of coffee all by yourself.

Kraft Discovers What's Wrong with Coffee: Not Enough Packaging.

The Tassimo machine uses prepackaged coffee pods (T-Disks) made by Kraft that work only in their machine. And whereas a cup of Maxwell House coffee runs about 4 cents, a cup of Tassimo runs over ten times that! Each T-Disk has a bar code that tells the machine how much water to add, how long to brew and at what temperature. And with lots of companies getting into the coffee pod business, the only coffee pod that will fit into a Tassimo is Kraft's T-Disk. It¹s like razors and blades. Give away the razor and charge whatever you want for the blades.

Krafting a Brand Strategy to Take Over Your Kitchen Counters

The thinking over at Kraft goes like this. What Starbucks is really good at is sipping bucks from people's wallets. If Starbucks has gotten people used to the idea of paying $1.60 for a better-than-average cup of coffee in their stores, why can't we do the same thing at home? Of course the bottom line here is, just how good is that cup of coffee? Is it ten times better than a cup of Maxwell House? And if Kraft really knows how to put good coffee in a T-Disk, why can¹t they figure out how to put good coffee in a can? Well, they really have, and it¹s called Gevalia, a stealth Kraft project that sells premium coffee by mail order to people who are romanced by names like Cafe Glockenspiel.

You can now make a great cup of coffee even if you've had a lobotomy.

In the old days, you'd go to a Starbuck's and some kid with a nose ring would perform some deft movements and hand craft a coffee drink just for you. These kids were called, somewhat pretentiously, baristas, which is the term for someone in Italy whose relationship to an expresso machine is akin to a race car driver's relationship to a racecar. Maybe these kids weren't really baristas, but at least they were going through the motions. Now at Starbucks, they press a few buttons on a sophisticated version of a coffee vending machine and, voila, your coffee-flavored dessert is ready.

The at-home expresso maker that Starbuck's sells is called the Barista. In other words, all the deftness and expertise is built into the machine. So any dummy can make an espresso. Just like at Starbucks. (For more juicy tidbits on Starbucks, you can visit Starbucks Gossip where you can find stories like, "Man always orders a 'medium' Starbucks coffee because 'grande' annoys him.")

So, if Starbuck's can't trust their own people to make a cup of coffee, where does that leave you and me? All this is reminiscent of Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff, where the first U.S. astronauts in training, all ex-test pilots, are going nuts because their flight is going to be controlled by a computer. Making a cup of coffee isn't rocket science. Or is it?