From lifestyle to creative economy: Consumer choices, services capes, and digital drivers in Indonesia’s coffee market

Abstract

This study reframes Indonesia’s urban coffee boom as a consumer‐culture phenomenon with concrete managerial and policy levers. Using a descriptive, integrative approach, we synthesize observations from a source presentation with established frameworks—Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB), servicescape and the stimulus–organism–response (S–O–R) model, hedonic consumption, and experiential marketing—to explain why youth segments dominate demand and why sweet, milk-based iced variants at ~IDR 23,000 have become the anchor offering. We argue that photogenic, comfort-optimized café environments act as dual-purpose assets: they enhance on-site affect (pleasure, arousal) and generate user-generated content that compresses customer acquisition costs via social proof. Baristas function as cultural intermediaries, translating origin stories and craft into authenticity cues that raise willingness to pay and loyalty. We propose a testable mechanism linking servicescape and social-media exposure (stimuli) to hedonic motivation and perceived value (organism), and onward to repeat visits, basket size, and eWOM (response). Practical implications include instrumenting the store-to-content funnel, managing menu complexity while preserving hedonic payoff, and building barista-led community programs. Limitations include reliance on descriptive materials and the absence of multi-city causal evidence; future work should combine SEM, field experiments, and digital trace data to estimate elasticities and quantify media yield.