Op-Ed · Research

You can't copy-paste a market

When a store underperforms, the laziest diagnosis is the one everyone reaches for first: nobody here wants it.

KLEYA Coffee had a playbook that worked in Raleigh. They ran it again in Greensboro, and the Greensboro store underperformed. When I picked it up as a marketing research project, the explanation already hanging in the air was the obvious one: maybe Greensboro just isn't a KLEYA town.

That's the kind of conclusion that feels like analysis but is really just a shrug. So I refused to start there.

Turn the shrug into a question

“There's no demand” isn't really a finding. It's an assumption dressed up as one. The more useful move is to break the vague feeling of underperformance into questions you can actually answer. Do people here know KLEYA exists? Do they understand why it's different? Will they try it once, and will they come back? Each of those is measurable, and each one points at a different fix.

So I gave them numbers to clear. The plan set three targets the store had to hit: 30% brand awareness, 20% trial, and 30% repeat purchase within 30 days. That way the eventual findings couldn't be hand-waved. A store either clears the awareness bar or it doesn't, and the bar it misses tells you what's actually broken.

“No demand” is an assumption dressed up as a finding.

Let the secondary data kill the easy story

Before collecting a single survey response, the secondary research already undercut the demand explanation. Mintel's foodservice data showed 86% of consumers buy coffee or tea away from home, and 43% rotate across two or three spots. The demand is there. It's just contested. People aren't refusing to buy coffee, they're buying someone else's.

That reframes everything. If demand is healthy, underperformance is far more likely to be about awareness, differentiation, convenience, or local fit than about the market rejecting the concept. Those are problems you can market your way out of. “Nobody wants it” is not.

A playbook is a hypothesis

The real lesson isn't about coffee. It's that a strategy proven in one market is a hypothesis in the next one, not a guarantee. Raleigh's customers, competitors, and student population aren't Greensboro's. Copy-pasting the plan skips the one step that actually de-risks an expansion: checking whether the new market reads the brand the same way the old one did.

When something underperforms, the instinct is to fix it fast. But the fastest way to waste money is to fix the wrong thing confidently. Making the question measurable, and ruling out the story everyone jumps to first, is what keeps the eventual recommendation pointed at the real problem.

Related: the KLEYA Coffee research plan