SWOT Analyses – Continued
After today, I’ll be halfway done with the SWOT analyses, so those of you who find these boring (I honestly think they’re pretty cool, but whatever – to each his own) can rejoice! Actually, to be precise, I’ll be 60% done. On Saturday I’m going to recap my whole project, and that should be more fun than reading the SWOT analyses 😛
If you haven’t read the other two analyses, I would recommend it. I’m not going to keep explaining my point system. Your fault for not reading every day 😉 Just kidding. Here they are:
For All the Chart Lovers Out There!
ANYWAY –
We must press on! I am analyzing Bakery C today. They somehow completely beat the odds and came from 5th place in week 1 to winning 2nd place over all! Wow! Very exciting – let’s see how they accomplished it.
Here is the graph and category summary for Bakery C:
Just from glancing at this chart, I can already see that Customer Experience is an area of weakness….it’s wedge is significantly smaller than the other two wedges of Quality and Pricing and Design Options.
The bar graph appears to be pretty uniform…Mostly scores of 3 and 5, with a few 4’s, but also a few 2’s, so it’s pretty clear that improvement could be made, but they do some things REALLY well.
On to the analysis! Here is the chart that compares all five bakeries on the three categories of Customer Experience, Pricing/Design Options, and Quality:
Strengths:
The area Bakery C excels in is Pricing and Design Options, with Quality close behind. Honestly, they have SO MANY flavors available, it’s insane! Although some of those flavors aren’t always available 365 days a year, it’s still crazy how many flavors are offered! The designs of the cakes on their website (they weren’t really displayed in the actual store) were breathtakingly beautiful and extravagant! Their pricing is very reasonable (2nd least expensive of the five bakeries!) and their cake is absolutely delicious. Delivery is not a problem, and they offer “gluten aware” cakes as well!
Weaknesses:
Obviously by looking at the pie chart, we can see that Customer Experience is an area of weakness for Bakery C. This is unfortunate because that’s the one area that I feel should be prioritized the most. If your customer experience is bad, you can have the best cake in the world and no one will even find out. Customer Experience is the face of your business. When customers have a good experience with the store, they want to come back and refer their friends. But people don’t refer their friends to places where the service is bad. Trust me. The website is another thing – it took me about 5 clicks (high compared to the other bakeries) to find information on wedding cakes.
Opportunities:
Bakery C has really cornered the “trendy” market – they offer very extravagant cupcakes and cakes that are oftentimes unique to the buyer. An opportunity that I think Bakery C could take advantage of is the gluten free market or the vegan market. They already have gluten aware cakes/cupcakes, but making some that they can call gluten free rather than just “aware” would fit into their trendy niche nicely. Also, vegan products are starting to become more and more popular, so creating a vegan cupcake (especially with the big name brand they already have) could be really valuable for Bakery C.
Threats:
A threat for Bakery C concerning its wedding options is advertising and display. There aren’t very many full sized cakes on display at Bakery C’s store, and it’s not readily advertised on the website. Their cakes are beautiful, but their cupcakes get all the publicity. If Bakery C was looking to up their number of wedding cake orders, they should seriously consider displaying more full sized cakes in their store, as well as advertising more on their website’s homepage.
Conclusions:
Bakery C makes really good cake, for an excellent price, with amazing options available! Unfortunately, one has to dig to even know that they sell wedding cakes at all. Bakery C is mainly a cupcake shop that specializes in creating a cupcake for every holiday imaginable, so perhaps they’ve decided that full sized cakes are not worth advertising as much. However, I think that with a little more advertising, they could easily sell more wedding cakes!
Until next time,
Hope Frances
