NTSTB, salutes a visionary who changed the café landscape in India.

If you were someone who grew up in Bangalore in the late 90s, you’d be aware of the booming ‘Internet café’ culture. You paid for Internet usage by the hour, and then the more enterprising outlets offered to sell you a snack or a beverage. Then came Café Coffee Day with its very ‘cool’ first outlet on Brigade Road. It was the premium lifestyle of Internet cafes which (for that time) served an awesome cup of coffee. It felt good to go and browse the Internet there and feel a bit above the rest.

Soon enough with the internet becoming more accessible at home and on phones, the ‘Internet Café’ culture died a natural death.  Siddhartha Hegde, the man behind Café Coffee Day, very quickly realised that Internet was not the big Idea, but coffee had the potential to explode. Younger India was seeking more social spaces and Café Coffee Day was well poised to provide them that. Café Coffee Days started mushrooming across Bangalore and some other urban cities.

CCD had its sourcing story, in place and also its product story. Coffee (not the darshini filter kaapi variey) was still a new idea and had to somehow find favour with the youth. Then was born the now iconic line that is associated with CCD – “Lots Can Happen Over Coffee”. Siddhartha successfully took the focus away from the mundaneness of a cup of coffee, and put in on fun, noise, discussions, socialising, and many other reasons to walk into CCD outlet.

Ever since, the over thousand CCDs across the country have served as locations for business meetings, dating, catching up, birthdays, for innumerable start ups as a workspace and even as highway travel stops. Lots indeed happened over coffee.

Find a reason to buy into a brand, one that goes beyond product, one that embraces human emotion. Thank you for this lesson in Branding Siddhartha Hegde.