Developing a Bakery Brand Identity
The word "brand" may summon up massive brands like Pepsi and Coke, Land's End or Toyota for you, making yoy think of the massive marketing budgets these companies spend every year. But all businesses, large and small, have a brand to work with. You don't need to have an ad agency to have a brand identity.
A brand is basically just that -- your company's identity. Even a little coffee shop/bakery will have a distinctive feel to it that should reflect both the owner's personality or the mind-set of the customers. Your brand was engendered the first moment you defined who your customers were going to be in your business plan, but you need to move beyond mere demographics to be able to articulate your bakery's brand.
You need to move into more intangible things, like psychographics and geographics. If this is starting to sound like an ad agency pitch, let's stop with the big buzz words. "Psychographics" basically means the worldview of your customers. "Geographics" is geography (what a surprise), but broken down to the neighborhood level. You should care about the geographics of your customers because the bulk of your business is likely to come from people who live very close to your shop, maybe within two miles. You should care about psychographics because they will affect your menu. Is this a gluten-free crowd, or the kind who relish deep-fried butter? Depending on the answer, you will be serving very, VERY different food.
A brand indentity for a bakery, or any other food service company, needs to have its roots in food. What is your approach to food? Is this a bakery for hedonistic pleasures and death by chocolate, or are you more interested in the slow food movement, local ingredients, and providing healthy, delicious baked goods that show how good organic and local fare can be?
The choices you make with your approach to food and the shaping of your bakery's identity will show up all over the place, whether you choose to define them or not. They will shape your choice of decorations, your store policies (break it you bought it? Pay first and if you forget to pick up the cake, its your problem...), and how you treat your employees. In turn, those choices will affect how your employees treat customers. Everyone wants to start out on the high road and be super-kind and generous, but remember that this is a bakery -- even 10% profit margins are very rare.
Your brand will also play out in your packaging. If you are looking for glitz, you'll invest in really nice packaging that makes an impression when you set it down on someone's counter. But if you are really about the food, first, last and always, the packaging you pick may be very different. It might be plainer, or recyclable, or double re-enforced so that the pastries or bakes or cookies inside are protected from breakage, and will stay fresh for at least a few day.
If you can read only one book about branding, you might as well start with the slim little volume that started it all, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind
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Startup Costs for a Home Bakery
Startup Costs for a Retail Bakery
Licenses and Permits Required to Start a Bakery
Create a Great Bakery Storefront
Developing a Bakery Brand Identity
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