Positioning Yourself As a New Baker In The Industry
While we were there, we couldn’t help ourselves and just had to sample some of the baked goods the city had to offer. While we were stuffing our faces with pastries and doing our best to fend off the notorious canal geese, we got to thinking… How do you actually position yourself in the market as a baker?
In chocolate, it’s fairly easy to define yourself based on the chocolate you use, your style of chocolate bonbons and decoration techniques. While some of this applies to bakery, it’s a little harder to differentiate yourself.
For example, if you intend to launch a high-end patisserie that uses use a single origin dark chocolate with notes of red fruit and high bitterness, baked goods often have high fat ingredients such as butter and cream, removing a lot of the nuanced notes of the chocolate, so you have to think outside the box a little in terms of product.
This isn’t to say that as a baker your should stick exclusively to coatings, you can still use high-quality chocolate and get a fabulous result within a bakery setting, but how can you create a brand that not only helps you stand out from the crows, but also has a consistent rate of customer return and sales?
Standing out from the crowd
As we mentioned, it’s a little more difficult to define yourself in bakery as in the UK, it often falls into two categories: pastries, or traditional cakes and bakes.
While we are starting to see some more diversification into region specific bakes across the UK (Portuguese, Polish and even Nordic!), it’s not the easiest to pivot your bakery skills towards an entire region of baked goods.
With that in mind, we’ve popped a few ideas below to help you create your own bakery identity!
Pick a style and theme – especially for your social media pages
Think of your favourite bakery. What pops into your head first? The colour scheme, the products, the tone of voice, or all of the above?
It’s important that your bakery has an identity and isn’t something your customers can easily forget. This isn’t to say you should pick the most extravagant colours and write everything in block capitals, but do pick a style you align yourself with and stick to it. This includes your packaging and social media posts!
Have a core range your customers can associate with your brand
Obviously, you want your customers to keep returning for your delectable baked goods, but they need a consistent reason to be, well, consistent in returning. With this in mind, we recommend picking three or four products you can turn out at high volume and retain the quality each time.
For example, if your business was built around making mini loaf cakes, you would want three flavours such as cherry and almond, milk chocolate with hazelnut and white chocolate with raspberry. These core products can be what keeps customer return high and ensures you always have products you know will sell well.
It can be difficult at first to gauge what your most popular product will be, but a few weeks of judging product sales can quickly help you discover what your customers love. Some samples might even help shed light on this as it’s instant customer feedback!
Outside of your core range, experiment!
Once you’ve established your core range, it’s important to keep things fresh beyond this, as this can help attract new customers and even assist in the creation of seasonal products. Utilising well known brands as toppings, putting a fresh spin on famous flavours such as key lime pie, or just melding flavours together to create something entirely new! Either way, it’s good to have new flavours on the horizon every now and again as it’s a fantastic way to promote your business on social media via posts and show off your wonderful workmanship!
We hope this helped to inspire your bakery ideas, and hopefully kick start your foray into the world of baked goods.
Joe is a marketing executive, maker of baked goods and a Teesside accent so thick you could cut through it.
His favourite chocolate is Luker Nevado.
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