Greggs has dethroned Costa as the coffee operator with the largest footprint in the UK – with 2,737 stores it now has 30 more locations than its Coca Cola-owned rival.
The moment underlines the brand’s efforts in the UK’s growing coffee market (valued last year at £6.8bn), but how do coffee drinkers view Greggs?
Data from YouGov Profiles/BrandIndex shows that 14% of Britons buy from coffee shops at least once a week. A further 30% do it at least once a month and 39% purchasing less frequently than this. Currently, just 17% saying they never buy from coffee shops at all.
Looking at Greggs’ perceptions among weekly out-of-home coffee buyers, some 47% think it offers good value for money. This puts the brand thirty percentage points above Costa (17%) – and even further ahead of other chains.
It also performs comparably to Costa when we look at other metrics, such as Consideration, that measure which brand the public would buy from the next time they are in the market for a product. Greggs (46%) is a couple of points behind Costa (44%), but there is a more than ten-percentage-point gap between these two brands and the rest. It’s a similar story with Impression scores: Greggs (47%) and Costa (45%) are in the first two positions, with the other coffee brands trailing.
It is not only strong perceptions of value driving Greggs’ appeal to coffee drinkers – it performs similarly to its rival in terms of consideration across income groups. While the brand slightly underperforms Costa among those on a lower income (45% vs. 48%), it draws near-level among those on middle incomes (45% vs. 46%) and leads with the higher-income group (44% vs. 50%).
Among coffee-buying Britons, Greggs and Costa are pretty well-matched in terms of perception. However, with Greggs beating the competition on the question of value as consumer belt tightening looks set to continue, it seems set to pose a serious challenge to specialist coffee retailers, and one that goes beyond the number of stores it has opened.
This article originally appeared in City AM
Methodology
YouGov BrandIndex collects data on thousands of brands every day. Greggs and Costa's scores are based on daily surveys of UK adults. Data is weighted by age, gender, region, social grade, and ethnicity using a raking methodology.
Image: Getty
