Costa Coffee wakes up new markets with localized content — and caffeine

Everyone takes their coffee differently. Some prefer something fluffy and sweet, others take theirs frill-free and dark. For the past 50 years, Costa Coffee has delivered on its customers’ unique coffee preferences — something the brand doesn’t plan to stop doing even as it continues to expand beyond the United Kingdom, where it’s been voted a nationwide favorite for a decade and counting. While its 4,000 stores and 10,000 self-service Costa Express machines gain significant foot traffic, Costa Coffee’s digital presence, which includes a web and mobile app plus the customer rewards app Costa Club, fuels customer loyalty. On these platforms, Costa Coffee sets itself apart from other coffee brands by showing customers it’s helpful (by providing cafe locations), thoughtful (by offering deep product information) and giving (by sharing discounts and other perks).

When Costa Coffee was confronted with the opportunity to switch up its tech stack and digital governance, its team of engineers researched, built and pitched a plan and new technology that would allow its brand voice to continue to be as bold and expansive as its caffeinated offerings. 

Brewing the right content solution, not just a good one

In 2019, Costa Coffee left the Whitbread family and was acquired by The Coca-Cola Company. Joining such a recognized conglomerate was equal parts exciting and stressful for Costa Coffee as the brand was given just five weeks to offboard from its previous CMS. Costa Coffee engineers had two options: move to Coca-Colas’s well-known, heavily supported legacy CMS or pitch a different, brand-specific content solution to its new owners.

While the first option would be the easiest, Costa Coffee engineers knew it would be limiting. The timeline and processes surrounding content publishing, editing and management would depend on governance granted — or restricted — by the brand’s new parent company. “We try to build a personal relationship around coffee so, while Coca-Cola’s stack is great, we had some questions on how our brand would work with that stack,” says Gordon Lucas, global head of engineering with Costa coffee. The brand moved to explore other content solutions.

Building a buzz around the globe

Customer loyalty wasn’t the only thing Costa Coffee engineers were seeking. They needed a solution that would yield a quick return on business KPIs and a strategy capable of supporting the brand’s plans to enter the American and Japanese markets. It also wanted to tailor its web content for the locations where Costa Coffee was already established — Europe, the Middle East and APAC. The goal was to have a tech stack that could grow with Costa Coffee. An API-first, headless solution was a no-brainer. Contentful came recommended by an internal engineer and after a quick proof of concept followed by approval from Coca-Cola, Costa Coffee was free to build their stack and architecture their way.

While Costa Coffee relies on Google Translate to speak customers’ languages — they speak to market-specific preferences with individualized websites supported by individual spaces and diverse content module libraries in Contentful. “Each site follows the same brand guidelines but they are unique to each market. For example, the Japanese market — we're technical about their coffee, they want to see the details of where it’s sourced and there's also nutritional information. In Germany, it’s all about the experience — the smell and sound. Teams working for each market have the ability to customize the content and modules to these market-specific preferences,” says Sezin Cagil, agile delivery manager with Costa Coffee. 

Costa introduced automation processes to move builds along even quicker. They now have 15 localized websites — and that number will continue to grow. With automation and its “drag, drop and tailor” method for building localized sites, Costa Coffee’s four-person engineering team — plus the market-located team spearheading the project —  can easily support its growing network of websites. The brand now has the potential to stretch around the globe without stretching its budget, workload or team.

Blending tools, teams and responsibilities

While Costa Coffee landed on a headless content solution, it took advantage of having the ability to pull in the best tools for each job. In addition to Contentful, Costa’s tech stack includes (but is not limited to) the following technologies: Akamai, Buddy, JavaScript, Netlify, Google Maps, Google Translate, Adobe Target, Adobe Data, GraphQL and Storybook. Being able to easily introduce or eliminate tools means Costa Coffee engineers can quickly build up or tear down new, perhaps experimental personalized experiences.

Tech stack talk aside, Contentful has been an easy software for non-technical and technical Costa Coffee team members to learn. Sezin and Gordon agree that ease of operation is something all brands should weigh when considering new technology. “Because of the way Contentful is set up — and how we’ve set up our templates and models — marketers find it quite easy to use. They're able to build sites, grow them and respond to needs autonomously. Over time they gain confidence and can begin creating and adjusting at pace. I think that's really important to scaling,” says Sezin. The two also agree that the ability to preview content and make quick rollbacks provides peace of mind as it keeps mistakes to a minimum. Those that do make it out into the world can be smoothed over in seconds. 

Going forward, Costa Coffee engineers are looking to streamline their Contentful user interface further. “We work as a group. We design with and learn from each other so it’s really important that every person has access to the tools and team members they need to get the project done,” says Sezin. Costa Coffee is already using Netlify to achieve some wins on this front and with Contentful’s vast app marketplace, they’ll be able to introduce more as new needs arise in the future.