Positioning Lantern’s barista workshops

Fictional case

It is June 2027. Lantern’s barista workshop is a three-hour Saturday session for about 12 people at $125 a place, run in a hired room with Lantern’s training machine; a full one contributes about $950 after $550 for the room, materials and a second trainer. Lantern ran 14 workshops from March to December 2026, in person, online and hybrid; this project is about the in-person one. Ana wants to run more of them without cutting the price, but she doesn’t know who books them or why, what they should stand for against the alternatives, or what to change. Lantern, Ana, the other providers and every figure are fictional.

What you have:

A survey of 210 people (past attendees and newsletter readers who opened the e-mail invitation; not a probability sample): how much each of six things matters in a workshop (1 not at all, 7 essential), what they would pay for a three-hour workshop, age band, whether they have attended before, their ideal workshop rated on the same six attributes, and their ratings of four options on those attributes. Most respondents haven’t taken the other three options, so their ratings of those are impressions.
The six needs: hands-on skills (“Learning to make café-quality coffee at home”); social (“A fun night out with friends”); gift (“Something to give as a present”); career (“A qualification that helps me work as a barista”); value (“A low price”); schedule (“Times that suit me, such as weekday evenings”).
The options rated: Lantern Workshops, Calder College, Kettle Lane Coffee Club, CremaClass online. Calder College runs a six-evening course for $210 with a certificate at the end; Kettle Lane Coffee Club runs cheap tasting evenings for groups of friends; CremaClass is an online video course for $39, available at any time.
Ana’s view of her workshops: strong on hands-on skills, fun and as a gift; weak on careers (no certificate), price (far above CremaClass) and times (Saturdays only). She is thinking about two changes: gift vouchers, and weekday evening sessions, which office workers asked for (M01).

What you will produce

The segmentation: the variables, the number of segments and why, and each segment’s profile and size.
A weighted scorecard of the segments, with how sensitive the choice is to the weights and to how competition is measured, and a targeting strategy.
A persona for the target segment, built from the data.
A reading of the perceptual map, and a check of Ana’s planned changes on the map and in the full ratings.
A positioning statement, the changes that would make it credible, and a memo to Ana.

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