Luckin Coffee launched towards the end of 2017 and was taken to an IPO 17 months later with a valuation of $4.2 billion. Not bad for a brand whose name was chosen at random by a lawyer in a rush to register a company born not out of a love of coffee but an understanding of data (and that’s why its stock was floated on Nasdaq, a favourite for tech listings).
“We’re not doing product marketing, we’re doing user marketing,” Viveca Chan, founder of WE Marketing Group, explained at the IPA’s annual EffWorks conference (London, October 2019): “identify...