Coffee on the third horizon
		Why Illycaffè paid someone to drive 2,000km across Europe in a 50cc van with a coffee machine strapped to the back Financial Times Creative Business, June 26, 2001 Tomorrow night, customers at a coffee shop in Trieste will watch a live webcast of partygoers at Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design in London, who will be watching a video of a man who drove 2,000km across Europe in a 50cc van with a coffee machine strapped to the back. Diego Paccagnella, a final-year student at St Martins, spent two weeks at the beginning of May driving from Trieste to London visiting towns and villages, handing out cups of coffee wherever he stopped and videoing what happened. The resulting (edited) video is what is being shown at St Martins. "It was the randomness that appealed to me," says Paccagnella, "seeing how you can meet people and interact with them, seeing what can happen." The funder of all this (the company doesn't like to use the word "sponsor" - it implies too coercive an arrangement) is IllycaffS&Mac255; (Illy), the Trieste-based coffee distributor best known for its distinctive silver and red tins. However, according to Franco Di Lauro, Illy's brand and strategy manager, the idea wasn't to sell more coffee. "What our involvement with colleges like St Martins gives us is a different point of view on projects that we call `third horizon', that is to say are five to eight years away. The students we work with have a clear idea regarding the brand, but they look outside our immediate needs and give us suggestions that we can put into production in the longer term." Illy has been involved with St Martins since 1999 and also works with other design schools including PS1 in New York, Ensci in Paris and the Politecnico di Milano. These collaborations give the company access to what Di Lauro calls "some very creative people who are not involved in coffee". Paccagnella approached Illy because "they treated us differently from the other companies we worked with in college. They treated us as adults. Most people in industry want to know from A to Z exactly what you are going to do. Surprises are not allowed. But Illy wanted that unpredictability. They wanted to see what happened." Illy provided a 50cc Piaggio Ape van with an espresso machine in the back, a tent on top and a "large number" of disposable coffee cups. The company also paid for his food, petrol and coffee. Paccagnella set off on April 27 finally making it to London by May 11, having crossed six countries at an average speed of 30km/h. He soon lost count of the number of people he met along the way but taped or photographed almost every encounter. "Because we couldn't drive on the motorway," he says, "we were visiting villages that weren't even on the map. Some people loved the idea straight away, laughing and getting into it; others just stood in amazement. We got out the coffee once people were interested, when the conversation got going. There is not much to say about coffee itself, but it provokes conversation and this is what Illy were interested in." "Diego brought us back tapes, contacts and information about what the reaction was when someone approached you with coffee," says Di Lauro. "Coffee is a sort of commodity. You can brand the container, but you can't brand the coffee so easily. The taste is distinctive, but you have to savour it to know it and for that you have to educate the customer. That was one thing we wanted to look at. We wanted to learn more about the one-to-one relationship with the customer." Funding a student to drive a 50cc vehicle across Europe and sleep in a tent can't have made much of a dent in IllycaffS&Mac255;'s marketing budget - although the van now has to be repaired after a car crashed into the back of it on the Hook of Holland to Harwich ferry. In spite of that the old-school marketing moaners will probably be wondering why the company didn't do some normal market research like everyone else (and they would be appalled by the tiny size of the Illy logo on the van). For Di Lauro, though, they have missed the point. "Traditional market research and brand management is very useful for first-horizon projects - those going on now. It is less useful for second-horizon projects and for third-horizon projects less again. The good ideas on the third horizon are done by the seat of your pants - you don't know what is going to happen. We are not about simply selling more coffee. We are interested in recuperating the anthropological meaning of coffee - the exchange of ideas, the communication. We want to find that meaning again." That should shut them up.