Leading bakery franchise Bakers Delight understands the importance of a decent company website.
Early last year, it engaged Visual Jazz to develop and execute its new website strategy.
The challenge was showcasing a staple product offering – freshly baked bread – in an engaging and informative way. Differentiation needed to be achieved to strengthen the position of Bakers Delight as an industry leader in the fresh bread market.
Bakers Delight wanted its customers to be able to visualise baked bread online in a format that aroused the senses the same way as walking into a bakery does. There was also a need to build a sense of community around the brand to bring the bakeries to life online.
A key feature of the website is an online space called the virtual bakery, which replicates a bakery environment including a sales staff visual. It provides the user with a product search functionality, with over 300 products, with the top 100 featuring 360-degree product images.It also displays general product information, key health benefits and nutritional panels.
Ensuring the virtual bakery reflected the Bakers Delight brand was not without challenge itself. Each element had to be considered to provide the user with the familiar Bakers Delight experience – from merchandising, to product placement, tastings, uniform and overall bakery layout. As a business whose strength lies in innovative product development, the Bakers Delight homepage needed to be easily adaptable to display the latest product campaign front and centre. The homepage uses Flash and provides the user the option to scroll through the top three features on the website, in an engaging fashion.
The company’s redeveloped website www.bakersdelight.com.au was launched in September 2009, and also includes a range of other features including franchising and careers application process, a health blog, a Google maps bakery locator and bakery for sale functionality. The site has been clocking up an average of 23,000 unique browsers per month. Each day, it receives an average of over 740 unique browsers, with over 1,000 page impressions. On average, each browser spends an average of three minutes on site, with more than five pages visited each time.
