Just two weeks after Totnes councillors voted to ban Costa Coffee from opening its first store in the Devon town, Retail Gruppenfuhrer, Heinz Weisz gave an overview of their latest blitzkrieg:
- By the end of the year forty Costa Coffee outlets will be opened in a strategic ring around the outskirts of the town, ready to receive outgoing trafffic from the A385 Ashburton Road;
- Every empty shop in the town will be plastered with 'This Could Be A Costa' banner to show the locals what they are missing;
- Training teams of local 'agitators' to post unflattering reviews of existing coffee shops on Tripadvisor;
- Leading a coffe hall 'putsch' to the Town Hall to demand councillors reconsider their decision; and
- Starting an online blog - 'Der Sturmer' to highlight how towns with Costa Coffee are prospering.
Herr Weisz was confident of victory by the end of the year. “We will demoralize the enemy from within by surprise, terror and sabotage. This is the war of the future. The receptivity of the masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan.”
