Trident Booksellers on Hollis St. makes the best coffee in the city, the province and quite possibly the country. Period. End of discussion.

There, I’ve said it and I don’t care who knows it. Now, I’m as opinionated as the next person, but I’m not very often so declarative, leaving little or no room for debate or contradiction. What give me this presumed authority? Well, anybody that knows me can attest to my addiction to coffee. Sure, many people can make this claim, but mine is particularly insidious. My unique dependence has taken over 30 years to develop. I first became hooked in my teens on my mother’s Nescafe freeze dried simulated coffee, then moved up to Nabob drip coffee. I spent a few years getting very intimate with my local Tim Horton’s in Halifax before spending the better part of the nineties sampling every Starbucks in BC’s Lower Mainland and Whistler. Upon returning to Halifax in 2003, I spent a few months hitting all the baristas I could find before discovering the Trident. Like some backstreet opium den, regulars there shuffle in and out of this obscure south end Halifax location for their daily fix. Recently, I was sick for several days and was unable to get downtown for a hit. When I finally did take that first sip of a double short cappuccino in a week, it felt like I was mainlining the purest drug on the planet. The feeling was at the same time euphoric and frightening.

Now, if I have offended anyone who thinks that the Smiling Goat makes a fine drip or feels that Java Blend makes a superb latte, I will have to admit that they both are excellent proprietors of quality beans and take great pride in their craft. In addition, there are many shops with better pastries, more comfortable surroundings and broader smiles, but please refer to my statement, “makes the best coffee” — not best coffee shop or favourite place to check out cute coeds.

So what the hell does this have to do with branding and marketing? Well, one of my favourite books on my shelf is Selling the Invisible by Harry Beckwith. In it, he starts by saying the first step in service marketing is to fix your service. In other words, make the service or product that you produce as good as it can possibly be before you ever consider doing an ad, brochure or website. The Trident is a testament that, in some cases, just a great product is simply enough. For our sake, I’m glad that is not the case with all products and businesses.

I've been in the marketing game for almost 25 years now and the most valuable thing I've learned is that I have a whole lot more to learn. I started off in sales and worked my way up (so I thought) to advertising. In hind sight, I realize that sales was the top! You can have sales without advertising, but advertising without sales is just useless art. When Trampoline Branding was formed, we set out with that firmly planted in our minds. Now more than ever we need to keep it very simple for consumers. Good thing, I'm a very simple guy!