Coffee Friends

When Alamah started to manage the accounts of Oman Avenues Mall, the largest shopping mall in the Sultanate, one of its priorities was to strengthen the Mall’s role in the community and promote the Mall as an institution close to all people by offering an exceptional experience rather than a business that wants to raise its sales.

To achieve this, Alamah formulated a communications strategy on social media and proposed several implementation and communication mechanisms, such as the implementation of a number of initiatives aiming at getting closer to and interacting with the community.

Cafés are one of the most important attractions in any mall. We, at Alamah, recognise that the culture of coffee and cafés is growing. We believe that coffee is a synonym of wakefulness and imagination.

We wanted to distinguish the Mall as a destination that celebrates coffee and coffee lovers in all cafés and restaurants serving coffee in the Mall. However, tweeting or publishing a story about it was not enough to draw a new image that would make the Mall a great destination for coffee and café lovers.

Alamah conducted several studies and surveys in this field and found that many Omanis and Mall visitors love coffee; they even take and publish photos of their coffees on social media. However, coffee lovers were dispersed and the content they published on social media was quite scattered.

Therefore, Alamah came up with the idea of creating a virtual coffee lovers’ community. The idea focused on effective communication with coffee lovers and promoting types of coffee and cafés offered in the Mall for this community.

The initiative was promoted under the name and the hashtag “Coffee Mates”, with the aim of bringing all coffee lovers together via an electronic platform since they all had something in common; which is their love for coffee.

Alamah has worked side by side with Oman Avenues Mall to develop this idea. We initially chose the name “Coffee Friends”, an easy-to-use name in both Arabic and English. The #CoffeeFriends initiative included a range of marketing activities that enhance the relationship between the coffee mates’ community and Oman Avenues Mall, through:

• Using a unified hashtag in all events and content.
• Produce a content that balanced between promoting the coffee community, types and culture as well as Oman Avenues Mall cafés.
• Inviting a group of influencers who had to be coffee lovers to attend “How to make my coffee at home” workshop, which was held in one of Oman Avenues Mall cafés. Through this workshop, the coffee community was introduced to Oman Avenues Mall.
• Tweeting directly from the #CoffeeFriends workshop on social media, which made the Hashtag trending on that day.
• Posting photos and videos of the event directly using the Hashtag on Oman Avenues Mall accounts.
• Influencers used the Hashtag during and after the event to share their experiences.
• A large number of followers, who may not be part of the current audience, joined Oman Avenues Mall Hashtag to discover how the Mall celebrated the coffee community.