Regardless of the size of your bakery or pâtisserie, you need to have your branding focused to communicate your offer to a passing customer in five seconds.

This might sound simple, but only the successful brands achieve it. Sit outside your world and see your brand, logo or image as if for the first time.

Pretend you have just stepped off a plane in a foreign country and you have fresh, critical and focused eyes. Does your brand convey what was in your vision of what you wanted your life’s work to represent?

While I was at Brumby’s, we re-branded the company six times in a period of 30 years. Sometimes we re-branded for an improvement, sometimes to freshen up; sometimes it was a revolution, sometimes an evolution. I want to share with you my experiences with the Brumby’s brand while I controlled the levers.

The most recent brand change was the most successful. To achieve it we followed the eight step strategic planning process outlined in some previous editions of this magazine. We took all the research, focus group feedback and usage/attitude survey data and appointed a re-branding company to pitch their concepts.

This started with a brand planning day where we got all the key stakeholders to identify what we wanted the brand to stand for: topics, claim to fame, core values, personality, fan base, competitive base, fan needs, emotive appeal and the hero all distilled into the brand star.

Here are seven tips when considering the re-branding of your business:

1. Undertake research, including a usage and attitude survey;

2. Retain a branding expert to communicate your message simply;

3. Select appropriate font, colours, positioning statement, strapline and device;

4. Make sure the final product has been trialled in-store and clearly demonstrates its true worth;

5. Produce a brand image manual and signage guide and issue these to all people involved;

6. Appoint a person responsible for all applications, for example, a brand controller; and

7. Protect the integrity and image of your brand at all costs.

Once you have established where your brand sits, you need to check your pricing is reflective of the outcomes of the brand star positioning. The idea is your pricing strategy needs to suit your customers’ expectations and demographics. If your strategy is to be the cheapest, then it’s easier for your competitors to beat you.

A supermarket can easily beat you by one cent, no matter how low you are prepared to go. Accordingly, you’re better off building your reputation on service and quality, which the supermarkets find difficult to copy because of their size.

So get in the helicopter and see your brand as your customers and competitors see it, invest – get the experts in and get the right fit.

Branding is not just a part of your bakery, it is the core of your bakery. Surround the brand with great product and exceptional service and you can’t fail. A lot of the brands I see on my travels are the 1975 version of the above. You don’t have to take as long as we did to get it right. Please, learn from our mistakes.