Project 04 · Academic · MKT 429

A 16-section marketing plan for Borough Coffee

How does a business this rooted in being local actually grow without diluting what makes people loyal to it? That tension drove the whole plan.

The challenge

For MKT 429, my team of five built a full 16-section marketing plan for Borough Coffee, an independently owned specialty shop on Mendenhall that runs on a living-wage model and ethically sourced beans.

What stuck with me was the central tension of the project: Borough is genuinely good at being local, and the thing people love about it is exactly the thing that makes it hard to scale. Push too hard on growth and you risk becoming the kind of place its regulars came to Borough to avoid. So the brief we set ourselves was to grow the business without flattening its identity.

How we got there

We grounded the plan in research rather than assumptions. We ran a 25-plus question Qualtrics survey to understand why customers actually choose Borough, audited the shop's website and search visibility, and mapped them against Chandler's, Union Coffee, and Starbucks to see where they genuinely stood apart. From there we built four customer personas grounded in real motivations, so every later recommendation could point back to a specific kind of customer.

What we recommended

The centerpiece was a Coffee Club subscription designed to turn an underused 2,000-contact email list into recurring revenue. It's a growth lever that deepens loyalty with existing fans instead of chasing a broader, shallower audience. We paired it with an events calendar, a social content plan, and in-store signage, all tuned to amplify what makes Borough local rather than paper over it.

What I took away

The hardest part of strategy usually isn't the tactics. It's protecting the thing that makes a brand worth being loyal to while still giving it room to grow. Borough sharpened how I think about that trade-off.

Deliverables

• Situation analysis and SWOT
• Competitor matrix and website / SEO review
• Four target customer personas
• Coffee Club subscription and events strategy
• Social content calendar and signage plan

Tools

• Qualtrics, Mintel, secondary market research

The full plan

Read the complete 16-section marketing plan below, or download a copy.