You wouldn’t know it from the varieties of flavoured, steeped and blended tea being hawked by beverage companies on this side of the Atlantic, but the market for instant coffee is starting to percolate in the UK - at the expense of the traditional tea bag. (/rimshot)

There’s still hope in the market, though. A new innovation - PG-2-Go - a packaged tea cup with a retractable tea bag (so you can select your own strength) is apparently building market share. The other, more traditional, tea companies are being squeezed between a growing preference for instant coffee and suicidal price wars with grocery companies’ house brands.

The Guardian covered this seismic movement in the British cultural landscape earlier this week. Deep in the piece, an admission from Unilever that their previous attempt to shore up their tea business in the UK had failed:

“Five years ago Unilever boldly tried to resurrect the Lyons spirit and challenge the espresso bar culture by piloting four teahouses under the Cha brand. They have since closed but a Unilever spokesman said: “The experiment taught us a few lessons - one of them was that we are definitely not a retailer.”(Guardian)

What? Does this mean Unilever - with their horde of consumer good products and marques - doesn’t know how to build from hundreds of millions of pounds’ investment in promoting benefits and attributes into a sustainable consumer experience?

Advertising minty-fresh goodness, new cleaning power and ultra lemony sparkle will move individual boxes off the shelf - but now that grocery stores have figured out the tricks behind house branding and discount pricing, are brand-building marketing campaigns strong enough to stop market share erosion?

It seems like the tea companies already know the answer - and they could draw upon a hundred years of emotional and cultural history tying them to their customers.

More details on Unilever’s attempts to diversify into personal services and retail. There’s also a Cambridge case study in the failure of their myhome services.