I had lunch last Saturday in Philadelphia with the Philadelphia Inquirer’s David Sullivan and I discovered an ING Café near our restaurant.
Oh my God!
The ING online banking company is entering the Starbucks market?
Not opening banking offices, but offering a cozy space to “sip, surf and save”
Soup of the day, sandwiches, and salads are the main food groups at ING cafés — and change daily.
You can watch the news on large-screen televisions connected to CNN and CNBC.
ING Café serves Peet’s coffee, offers free computers and free internet, cool chairs, plenty of natural light, bright orange colors, newspapers, magazines and financial publications.
And from time to time they hold financial micro-seminars.
Is it a bank or is it a café?
The answer is both.
They serve you coffee and tea as well as pastries ($1.50) and lunch items ($6-$7).
And all the baristas are bankers themselves, so they can sell you a low-interest rate account, while serving you a big latte.
The first ING Café in the U.S. was launched in Manhattan and that “branch” yielded more than $200 million in new accounts and mortgages within a year of opening.
The New York Cafe opening was followed by a cafe in Philadelphia at 17th and Walnut Streets in October 2001.
In 2001, more than $300 million in deposits were taken in through the two cafes with the average opening account balance triple that coming in through other channels.
The idea is very smart.
As ING says:
“We believe saving money should be as simple as having a cup of coffee. So we invite you to come in and experience just how refreshing it is to sip a latte, surf the Internet for free and talk to us about how we can help you Save Your Money.”
In Philadelphia, as in many of our big metropolitan cities, the number of coffee places must double or triple the number of newsstands or newspaper vending machines.
What ING is doing is what great newspapers must do.
Open convenient stores or coffee shops where readers can find, buy or read our newspapers.
“Coffee and newspapers” are the perfect match.
The motto?
What about “read, surf, talk and drink.”
A place for conversations, drinks and online and offline reading.
The sad reality is that today it is easier to find a coffee shop than a newspaper vendor.
So, our crisis is not a newspaper crisis, but a one of imagination.
Newspaper marketing people, wake up!
Newspaper circulation managers, wake up!
We need “News Cafés”
Because we need newspapers.
And we love coffee.
