In real life, marketing can never be effective if its strategy is not backed by a truly strong offer – and our team, when we started working on this project, decided to first delve into the depths of the problem surrounding the Tea Country brand and the physical attributes of its offer. Then, we built our proposed marketing strategy on a brand that already had a strong identity.

When we got to know Mr. Beso's story, the first thing that became clear in the conversation was that Tea Country was created, first of all, out of unconditional love for the business. At the initial stage, the creator's desire was simply to discover tea varieties, introduce them to a wide audience, and once again prove that Georgian tea is unique and valuable. During this time, Mr. Beso has gathered small tea producing brands around him one by one and thus fulfilled an important initial stage of the mission, and now our task is to establish the Tea Country as a new and distinctive brand, increase demand for its products and bring it to people.

Since people are not familiar with our brand at this stage, we agreed that after the brand identity was well established, we must definitely move forward with active integrated communication and ways to reach potential customers - Tea Country has not been active on social networks so far, the website functions intermittently, it is not easily accessible to users... In short, at the moment it is an initiative in which great sense is invested, however, from a business point of view, it is distant from the user and very intangible. Another major factor to overcome is that Tea Country currently combines more than a dozen brands, each with its own visual identity, and it is virtually impossible to convey what Tea Country has to say as a single brand in one tone - the consumer cannot perceive these products as one brand. The author of the Tea Country idea and we believe that this initiative has the potential to position itself as a premium tea brand and have already started thinking about solutions with this mission in mind.

Our solution process

We approached the task very thoughtfully: if Tea Country were our own company with existing problems, what would we do to fix them, grow and revitalize the brand. We should also take into account that a business at the startup stage should try to set the most effective marketing strategy possible, so that its implementation does not involve millions of investments. We had to be guided by the already developed and existing products, that is, we put aside the addition of new products to the tea country's offer, we removed all production-related activities from the tea country (which is also true in this context) and focused on refining the final product, placing it in the right channels and presenting it in accordance with the set positioning. 😚

In order to achieve the set goal, so that we would not have the same mistakes between what we said and the final result, we developed a concept according to which we will be guided in all channels, with all consumers, in all tastes... The concept is as follows: just as the Golden Fleece expresses a kind of treasure that is forever connected with Georgia, so is Georgian tea. However, there is one difference - everyone knows and remembers about the Golden Fleece, while tea is forgotten, it seems that someone buried it in the ground, and no one knows how to read the map to find the treasure...😉

Concept: Tea is the forgotten treasure of Georgia.

As we have already said, due to the different packaging of suppliers, Tea Country could not speak for itself as a single brand. Therefore, in order to establish the desired positioning, we decided to implement a complete rebranding, both in visual and strategic directions. After discussing with Mr. Beso the question of how realistic it was for suppliers to make such a change, we received a positive response and as a result of this process we will get Tea Country, which will be a unified brand - we, you and everyone will have the same associations and emotions when we see its products - when we see it, we will all think that in the case of purchasing this tea, we become part of the rich history and culture of Georgian tea.

Defining the consumer segment

First of all, we determined who our consumer persona would be and then we developed a style tailored to the consumer. Tea from the tea country is characterized by organic, carefully grown and hand-picked raw materials, the price of which should be higher than the standard, based on these characteristics. We have identified people with a growing interest in selling such tea as people over 20 years old, with average and above-average incomes:

- Family members who want to buy healthy products for their home

- People who live an active lifestyle and take care of their health

- Tea enthusiasts

To create a visual presentation that is appropriate for them, we need to maintain the premiumness, which is why it would be wrong to simply put the tea in cellophane bags. Therefore, instead of a bag, the tea will be placed in a cylindrical hard packaging, which will be elegantly presented in accordance with the brand positioning.

Preparing the product for communication

At this stage, we present a visual strategy moodboard for the branding of the tea country packaging, through which we want to convey a proud, confident and “wise”, experienced tone of origin and culture. In the design, we want to take into account the already created virtual tours, which we will place on the packaging with a QR code and allow consumers to easily visit the places where the tea is also served.

In accordance with the visual, we will also spread the communication tone accordingly across all channels and at the initial stage, we defined several KPIs that will help us evaluate the effectiveness of the strategy and adjust the directions if necessary:

1) Profit Margin +20% or more due to the premium pricing policy, as we will see the market readiness according to additional research.

2) Client Retention Rate - we want our customers to come back to us again

3) Customer Satisfaction - satisfaction with service (stand) and delivery service in physical channels - in order to properly manage customer expectations and improve processes, we believe it is necessary to listen to people's feedback.

4) Number of units sold: X units - ROI compared to the current one and how we are growing in terms of sales, although we cannot calculate the growth rates of income, since we practically do not have demand today and we need to create it.

Social networks:

1) ROAS - return on social media advertising, their effectiveness - for retargeting and optimization of the type of advertising.             2) Impressions             3) Follower count

4) Audience growth rate - goal 20% in a few weeks during initial intensive communication

Explanatory steps: Communication stage 1

We have already mentioned the concept of the forgotten treasure and we wanted to think of a content-related one at the beginning of the communication. We started from this concept and decided to organize an outdoor “treasury hunt” campaign, the idea of which will be a real treasure hunt throughout Tbilisi. We plan to hide a chest full of tea in a certain place, which will be found by clues given during the campaign. However, the main factor is that people will not know what kind of wealth is in the chest. At the same time, in cooperation with various media outlets, we will create hype on social networks, as if the only concern of people in Tbilisi is finding hidden treasures. At the culmination of the campaign, when the “hunter” finds the chest, our first stand will open, where the customer will have the opportunity to taste/buy the desired tea 2. After that, we will continue on social media on behalf of the tea country - with an opening image video, which will briefly show us the entire chain that the tea country product goes through from the plant to the consumer in a documentary-graphic style.

3. In parallel, we will partner with a delivery service to remove the problem of distance from potential customers and offer them a supply chain tailored to them as much as possible.

4. In addition, we want to offer customers sets/gift sets that will allow them to get acquainted with several flavors at once.

Communication stage 2

We will continue to communicate on social media with our already mentioned tone of communication (TOV) and will offer people mainly three formats of content.

1. Videos about the several corners where our products come from.

2. Video/photo reports about our suppliers and their direct history of creation, picking…

3. Blogs about tea: about nutrition, history, general world culture…

It is important to have festivals and events taking place abroad, which we can partner with and offer our tea to their guests, however, since the implementation of these events does not directly depend on our brand, we do not include them in the strategy.

At the same time, we studied the lifestyle of our mentioned consumer segment and realized that we need to work with cafes and hotels to add products from the tea country to their menus. We contacted the relevant institutions and after discussing such partnerships with them one by one, we learned that adding products to the menu is a process that takes several months in most cases, which is why it will not be possible to develop such a direction at the initial stage of our communication, however, as awareness increases, more interest will arise from them and it is very realistic that we will be able to implement this in the near future. This will give us additional stable channels for increasing awareness and we will directly, through tasting, reach that segment of consumers who, due to their lifestyle, are most likely to be interested in premium products. We will also reach foreigners who might not otherwise have heard about our brand.

Expenses & Revenue Channels

As we have already mentioned, we are breaking down our revenue sources into both physical and digital channels: these can be online sales, both through our own website and delivery apps, and direct sales, through a stand in a physical space. Another source of revenue is the tea cultural route, which Mr. Beso has already started to organize, and according to him, relevant (tourism) organizations will help us with planning.

In order to implement the marketing strategy we have discussed, and given that the country of tea is actually only now entering the market on a large scale, we will obviously need to incur certain expenses to implement all this. When calculating, we constantly kept in mind that we did not miss the real capabilities of the startup and distributed the specific tasks to our team:

● Brandbook, in order to properly manage the communication line and style and ensure the proper representation of the brand image across all channels

● Packaging design

● Social Media Management

● Content production, for example, gathering information for blogs, interviewing respondents, graphic design elements…

Prepared by students of the Free University within the framework of the TBS Startuper program.

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