Nike Coffee… i’d buy that!

A few weeks back Team Motivii was at the TNW 2018 Conference in Amsterdam.

The event was amazing. People from around the world turned up to discuss how technology is changing the world, and everyone we spoke to was warm, friendly and engaging.

Motivii was invited to exhibit in the Future of Work section, where we found ourselves between two huge companies, Nike and Atlassian.

I’m pleased to say that even between these behemoths Motivii held its own, and the team talked to pretty much everyone who went past. We had no gimmicks, and we had no freebies: we simply relied on the charm offensive.

Nike and Atlassian, however, were giving away free coffee. That’s where it got interesting.

Take a look a look at this photo:

It’s one photo and i’ve just done a panoramic shot on the phone so you can see both stands at the same time (this was the view from our stand btw).

The queue for Nike’s coffee was always double or triple the size of the queue for Atlassian’s coffee.

I assumed that Nike’s coffee was much better, but they were using the same milk, and their coffee smelled the same…

After chatting with the baristas, I found that exactly the same coffee company was running both booths, and making exactly the same coffee.

So why were people waiting fifteen minutes for Nike coffee, when they could have taken two steps across to the Atlassian stand and had their coffee in less than a minute?

It was the power of the brand! People just felt more compelled to grab a Nike coffee, with Nike branding on the cup, than an Atlassian coffee, with Atlassian branding.

Powerful brands like Nike can exhibit at a conference that’s outside of their sector, lend their coolness, and attract a following. That’s why Nike’s coffee stand worked so well.

But having a team that’s motivated and keen to talk to strangers creates valuable relationships that last much longer than a cup of coffee. So thank you to Eren and Alan who helped on the Motivii stand. It looked like we were talking to more people that those on the much bigger Atlassian stand (it was like 10x bigger than us!).

I’d therefore always take a motivated team to man the stand over giving away coffee for free, only for people to walk off once they’ve had their fix.

On a final point, and a bit of a twist, this article appeared a few weeks back on my LinkedIn profile. What’s cool is that we got a whole load of views with over 400 employees at Nike reading the article. However, in second place were employees from Adidas reading up on their competition.

It makes me wonder how Adidas vs Nike coffee would have performed?