Wedding Cake Competitive Set Analysis
In a 31 day time period, I analyzed five different bakeries near me and created a point system to track my progress. In the last 6 days of my project, I conducted a SWOT analysis for all five.
In order to learn more about organization, business strategies, competitive set analyses, and SWOT analyses, I decided to analyze five different bakeries, rank them based off of predetermined subcategories, and conduct a SWOT analysis for each one.
I originally decided to do a competitive set analysis because I was looking for a project that I could do to learn more about sales and operations – my roles I have chosen to delve into. Amanda Grimmett, my Praxis advisor, suggested I do a competitive set analysis, but I had no idea what that meant. She explained it, but I also did some research on it so I could fully understand what it entailed.
This project encompassed both sales and operations in that I was studying strengths and weaknesses (sales – knowing your competition), and I was categorizing data and creating charts in order to make hypothetical suggestions for these bakeries to improve and be better organized (operations).
I chose to analyze wedding cakes specifically because I LOVE baking but analyzing bakeries alone was too broad. Wedding cakes are more specific, so that’s why I chose them to be the center of my analysis.
Week 1 – Customer Experience
During week 1, I analyzed customer experience which included email funnel time, cordialness, in-store service, cleanliness of store, website navigation, and many other subcategories.
I wrote a blog post on this week in further detail, check it out here:
Creating a Competitive Set Analysis
Here is the section of the spreadsheet I used for week 1.
I used the spreadsheet because it was easy to categorize my findings in chart form than making an individual Word document for each bakery. It also made it easier to compare the bakeries to each other because they were all in one place!
Week 2 – Pricing and Design Options
During week 2, I analyzed pricing and design options. This included flavor and frosting options, pricing and delivery options, alternative options (do they offer gluten free?), and a few other subcategories.
The blog post below is a mid-week check-in for week 2. First, I give an update on how this project is coming along, and then I tell how I created an SOP without realizing it!
How I Accidentally Created an SOP
Here is the blog post where I analyzed the subcategories for week 2:
Cakes, Cupcakes, Doughnuts, and ALL the Sweets
And here is the section of my spreadsheet where I kept track of my categories for week 2.
This is the same spreadsheet from week 1, just a different section of it 🙂
Week 3 – Quality
For week 3, I analyzed the quality of the cakes by tasting them and judging them based on appearance – it was both the easiest and hardest week! It was easy because there were fewer subcategories to score, but it was also hard because they all tasted good and I wanted to give them all high scores! Plus I had to drive all over and buy cupcakes.
The following blog post is a mid-week check-in for week 3 discussing a problem I had with my project that week (many bakeries thought I was getting married…whoops!):
At the end of the week, I finalized the results and declared a “winner” of my competitive set analysis:
And here is the spreadsheet for the third week’s analysis.
(As you can see, it’s the same spreadsheet used for weeks 1 and 2).
Week 4 – The SWOT Analyses
SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.
SWOT analyses are valuable because you can easily see where a business’s strengths are, what they need to improve in, opportunities that may have been overlooked that the company should take advantage of, and threats the company should be aware of to guard against. I decided to perform a SWOT analysis on each bakery in order to learn more about the process and to gain insight into these businesses’ strengths and weaknesses. Now, if I ever want to do a SWOT analysis for my own business or a business that I work for, I will be prepared.
I learned that you can’t just pick a random chart and expect it to work for anything you want it to. You need to consider your data first! I used the pie chart to compare each of the bakeries’ subcategories to each other and the bar graph to compare the different numerical scores I gave each subcategory. Since one of the categories had a different number of subcategories, I averaged the scores to get a more accurate comparison.
Here are the SWOT analyses for the five different bakeries I studied over the month of February and their corresponding graphs and charts:
And here is a chart comparing all five bakeries side by side:
This project was very valuable to me! I learned a lot from it, like people’s customer service (even if they don’t try to be) can be different online that in real life, no two bakeries are exactly the same, finding the best way to present your data is ESSENTIAL, coming up with a scoring system is extremely necessary, and every company has areas where they can improve.
More importantly, I learned how to document my projects along the way! The blog posts presented here are my documentation for this project, and this blog post goes into much more detail on what I learned:
