The Bread Bureau

It's the first big completed project for The Bread Bureau and Carambole Chocolate Bonbons And Workshops and I am very proud of the result! Our businesses might still be small but the speed at which we can bring awesome ideas to life is fantastic! #craftchocolate #thebreadbureau #carambolechocolate #corporategifts #adventcalendar #productlaunch

"This product is like Uber for..."; "This product is like Tinder for...". New products are often explained by comparing them to familiar concepts. But what happens if you choose the wrong concept as the yardstick? Imagine you've invented a brand new drink - a cappuccino! Where you live, everyone only ever drinks espressos. You did too, but one morning, your kid accidentally spilled hot milk into your cup. Angry over the ruined espresso, you still took a sip. The taste was exquisite! "Oh my, I need to add this to my cafe's menu!" - you thought excitedly. But here's the big question: how do you explain what a cappuccino is to guests who've only drunk espresso? How do you convince them this drink is tasty and worth trying? And how do you ensure they keep coming back for more? It all starts by creating a frame of reference. It's like a mental ruler we use to compare and understand things based on what we already know. It helps us make sense of new things by relating them to what we're familiar with. Often, it sounds like "Y is like X but..." The trick? Choosing the right yardstick! It can not only heavily impact who you'd be selling to but also where and how. Imagine you choose espresso as a frame of reference for cappuccino: - You could note the richness of flavor and call cappuccino "creamy" compared to espresso; - In terms of caffeine content, you could describe cappuccino as "mild" compared to a cup of espresso; - When considering the texture, you could decide cappuccino is "frothy" and "velvety" compared to the smoother texture of espresso; - You could even convince art enthusiasts by saying that cappuccino is a great canvas for latte art! :) Both drinks could appear on the menu of a coffee place, and it'd look logical. In fact, your cafe would enjoy more customers because now the menu has variety. Let's deliberately choose a less fortunate frame of reference. Imagine you chose hot cocoa as a yardstick for explaining a cappuccino (after all, both drinks have rich aroma and contain steamed milk). Boy, would you have a harder time convincing your audience! - You'd have to say something like "cappuccino is like hot cocoa but a tad bitter and without a rich chocolate aroma" - immediately sounding less exciting, doesn't it?; - Or "cappuccino is a warm drink with steamed milk, but it also contains caffeine", - indicating it's not suitable for kids; Cappuccino is a great drink - velvety, with character, and a subtle caffeine kick. Yet compared to hot cocoa it sounded anticlimactic. Not the cappuccino's fault at all! It's the frame of reference that was chosen wrong. Whatever you are selling, be extra diligent about your product's frame of reference. It's where every word could matter! Spend enough time formulating it because it's the first step in formulating your product's positioning, which could make it very easy to sell or extremely hard. #marketingstrategy #marketingtips #positioning #productpromotion #productstrategy #brandpositioning

👀Your customers are looking for you in the wrong place!😶🌫️ I recently experienced this first-hand, and I’d like to share a quick funny story. I'm a fan of a certain dessert—quark bars covered in dark chocolate. They taste like chocolate-coated cheesecake but don’t need baking. They’re buttery, creamy, indulgent—just amazing. Normally, I could only buy them in my home country, so I missed them a lot. When I learned a very similar product had come to the Netherlands, I was thrilled! I visited the grocery store chain that claimed to stock them—nothing. Another shop—nothing! Two more shops—still nothing🤬. I began to think they were a phantom product, and many would have given up by now, but I wanted them too much to quit. I scoured the brand’s website and then saw something—a video from the store introducing the product. Nothing new about the product itself, but there was an important clue—the shelf it was placed on. 🥳Bingo!And I saw my mistake-it was in the juices and smoothies section, and I had been looking in the dairy section, just as I would have at home. See what happened there? My context, set by the original product, dictated that these bars belonged in the dairy section. However, the new product was placed in the "healthy snack" section, making them invisible to me! Despite my strong desire to buy them, I simply couldn’t find them because my previous context was misleading me. This perfectly illustrates how crucial it is to be aligned with your customers. Are you sure they understand what you offer correctly? And more importantly, can they find you without specific directions? . . . . #productmarketing #positioning #growthexpert #productpositioning #productstrategy #marketingexpert

From sold-out concert halls to earning only $30 in a subway station - this is the cost of wrong positioning. Ever heard of the Joshua Bell experiment? 🎻 A world-renowned violinist who was selling out concert halls with tickets selling for hundreds of dollars, disguised himself to play classical music in a Washington D.C. subway station during rush hour. Bell performed for 45 minutes and his total earnings were… $30 😰. How could it be?! No one around had a spare moment to stop and appreciate the talent? Nope, interviews showed that people simply didn't find the music special enough. A world-class talent was sabotaged by his context. But how? This "blindness" was not intentional nor was it a lack of ability to appreciate beauty. In a world oversaturated with external stimuli, focus is a scarce asset. We ration it with care, heavily relying on context to help us decide what's worth paying attention to and what can be simply ignored. The commuters, on a mission to ration their attention span, were totally unprepared to stumble upon such talent in the subway station on a busy weekday morning. Joshua Bell's miserable earnings that day spoke for themselves… You can have a world-class product, but if your context is wrong, all the efforts to promote it could be in vain. 🛑 Positioning is the essential part of your marketing efforts that can make or break your business. It's like a layer that you create around the product which the outside world uses for cues and evaluation. Your job as an entrepreneur is to help potential customers understand what you are offering, how it compares to what already exists on the market and finally—why would they care about it? 🌟 What helped you find the right positioning? #marketingstrategy #marketingtips #positioning #productpromotion #productstrategy #thebreadbureau