Selling a Home Coffee Maker

By STUART ELLIOTT
New York Times

COFFEE drinkers, get ready for $150 million or more worth of java jive, courtesy of the world's best-known sellers of coffee and coffee makers. The ambitious goals of their advertising and marketing campaigns: persuade millions of consumers who increasingly prefer to leave home for their coffee fixes to stay home - and add another appliance to crowded kitchens.

The appliance in question is a new kind of coffee maker, priced at $60 to $120, which is intended to brew a cup at a time in about a minute, using coffee in prepackaged packets called pods. The machines, with names like Home Café, Senseo and Tassimo, will compete against lower-priced automatic-drip devices as well as more expensive machines, typically imported, that specialize in espresso.

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