I was watching a YouTube video featuring a TedTalk where a salesman asks a member of the audience for their pen. He then asks how much the person bought the pen for. "Five dollars," the guy tells him. The salesman then asks if anyone in the audience wants to buy his newly acquired pen for $5 bucks.

✍️ The salesman then says he's going to take the pen and drive it to a ritzy part of town to an expensive jeweler where he's going to place the pen in a mahogany wooden box lined with velvet and place it in a glass case and point a spotlight at it where you can only view the pen with the assistance of an employee who will unlock it from its secured cabinet. 🎁

The salesman asks, 🤔 "Do you think the pen would still be worth $5?"

The resounding answer was that the very same pen that was worth $5 is now worth more. Why? ✨The value changed✨ - even when the pen didn't. The more value we create, the higher the price point we can set.

💎 Consider the diamond-water paradox when thinking about value vs. price. 💧

Diamonds are far more expensive than water. The price of tap water is negligible and the average price of a 3-carat diamond is $41,395 (according to Google's AI).

But... ☀️ consider the shift if you were stranded in the desert, starved and dying of thirst. 🥵 Diamonds become worthless when your life is on the line, and the ✨value✨ of water has increased exponentially. While neither water nor diamonds changed - the situation around them did.

And value, the subjective worth of an object, increased the price of water and decreased the price of diamonds (to the desert dweller at least).

🤔 So - how do we apply this price/value concept to your bakery?

Increase ✨value✨ so you don't have to compete on price. This means adding value to everything around your product - your packaging, your photography, your customer experience, your response times, your availability, your product line, your return policy, etc.

Then raise your prices. Why? 🧠 We simple-minded humans associate high value = high prices.

A good indicator that your "value proposition" needs some polishing up is if you're getting a lot of price objections. The value isn't at the forefront yet, so they focus on price. Once you get your value proposition dialed in, price pushers will become a thing of the past.

👂 Snag this podcast on any major podcast player (Spotify, Apple Music, Audible, Amazon Music, or your desktop) by clickin' here - Episode 160 - Price vs Value Prop.

This week's podcast is a deep dive into a post I made in the group earlier this week - the post regarding "woe is me" threads saying the cookie industry is done, pack it up kids, you don't gotta go home, but you can stay... in this kitchen.

You see - that defeatist mentality ain't go no business being in a business-centric group. It will limit your sales and, over time, cause you to quit. Quite literally the opposite of marketing and growth mindsets.

😭 "But I've tried (and cried) everything! It's not working anymore!"

Have you, though? Have you actually tried everything? Because there are now 159 Baking it Down podcast episodes covering 159 marketing tactics. And I'll wager you aint' tried even a third of the stuff we talked about. That's what today's podcast is about.

And even if you did - 🥤 have you ever wondered why Coca-Cola, founded in 1886, ✨still✨ buys ad space at the beginning of every movie? 🎥 They've been at this for 138 years and they still keep hittin' the marketing campaign trail! It's because consistency - over long periods of time - produces results.

Marketing ain't a one-and-done. If it was, I'd be out of a job and 🤑 cookiers would be millionaires. It's repeated effort for a really, really long time. Let's jump into the post.

--

I often see people complain about their local markets in these groups.

• 🧈 The price of butter is too high,
• 📉 Competitor prices are too low,
• 👥 The market is saturated,
• 🚫 The market doesn't want cookies,
• 🎟️ Too many people teaching cookie classes,
• 🪑 Too few people taking cookie classes,
• 👎 The competition isn't as good as you,
• 😭 The competition has more tag-happy friends than you.

You get the point.

👀 There are 45,000 people here - so I get the honor of reading many contradicting opinions on why sales aren't where we expected them to be.

Teeechnically... 🙅 you can only write "the cookie game is done" if you attempted every marketing tactic covered in this group. Then, and only then, can you say with certainty that the party is truly over.

🏃 I mean - how can you say you won't win a foot race if you never ran the race in the first place? Same applies to marketing. Can't say you can't sell anything if you didn't try everything in your power to sell it.

You can't say, "No one buys my cookies" if you never told absolutely everyone that you were selling cookies, right?

So allow me to ask... have you:

• ✅ Attempted to market to commercial businesses by dropping by with a logo cookie.
• ✅ Worked on growing your review profile by getting new reviews and responding to bad reviews in a way that will increase sales.
• ✅ Focused on upping your curb appeal for in-person pickups.
• ✅ Implemented copy formulas to increase conversion rates - AIDA, PAS, 4 C's, 4 U's, Before After Bridge.
• ✅ Implented "customer delight" methods to differentiate yourself from your competitors.
• ✅ Used better adjectives to make your products and pitches sound more appealing in social media posts and emails.
• ✅ Streamlined your branding for easier brand recognition across all print and digital profiles.
• ✅ Run g-i-v-e-a-w-a-y-s to engage your page / group audience frequently.
• ✅ Focused on adding value to local community groups each week.
• ✅ Created your own local community group to better facilitate a value-added hyper-local community group.
• ✅ Consistently posted to your social media every week for an entire year.
• ✅ Created an email list on a newsletter sender (Mailchimp, Flodesk, Constant Contact).

We had a (very) abbreviated podcast today - thanks to the door guys. 🚪 But in the few minutes we did get to chit-chat, we wanted to touch on "uncomfortable mistakes."

😿 Being bad at something sucks. It's no fun making mistakes. In fact, it feels like bad business acumen to make mistakes, right? I mean - imagine a business built on mistakes. Who would want to hire them!?

But successful businesses were built on the backs of mistakes. It's the "failing forward" that separates the business-ending mistakes from the "oh - I learned another way not to do that, let me try something else" business-building mistakes.

🤦‍♀ Mistakes mean you’re learning.

If you're not failing, you're not learning. There's a clip on Reddit of a guy learning to do a backflip - he actually gets pretty okay, then starts doing worse before finally sticking the landing. *crowd goes wild*

🧠 That's how the brain works (well, not in learning how to back flip - I ain't got the health insurance plan to be trying that).

You try something new, and in your cluelessness, you have a bit of beginner's luck. As you intentionally refine your process, you get a little worse before finally becoming successful at something. Congrats - you learned something - you failed forward.

🤦‍♀ Growth = failing forward.

There's a difference between "failing" and ➡️ "failing forward." In the prior, you likely quit. This is the wrong type of mistake. The mistake we want is where we know we're going to mess up, but the whole time, we're making mental notes - "Ah yes, don't put the green Jimmy sprinkle in before the cake batter has cooled - that gives E.coli vibes. Noted."

📝 Then back to the drawing board once more to implement what we now know not to do - ta-da! We just failed forward. Enough failing forwards and you've got yourself a new skill, my friend!

🤦‍♀ Bring clients into the learning phase.

Don't be shy - invite others to cry! Kidding, it rhymed. But Corrie had a good point. When clients ask her to do stuff "out of her wheelhouse," she lets them know!

🤝 "Hey - this would be my first time trying that technique - I've always wanted to attempt it. Worst case, you got yourself some free red cake pops, best case, you got what you wanted! Let's do this!"

🤦‍♀ Have a refund fund ready to go.

Mistakes are only hard to stomach if someone loses. But in the event of failing forward, we hedge our bets with our "oopsie budget" - 👮‍♂ the proverbial baker get-outta-jail-free card when it comes to making mistakes. That way mistakes don't hurt so bad (our ego and our wallets). It's easier to take a risk when you know there's a financial net there to break your fall.

👂 Snag this podcast on any major podcast player (Spotify, Apple Music, Audible, Amazon Music, or your desktop) by searching - Baking it Down - Episode 158 - Uncomfy Mistakes.