Marketing for a Candy Store: A Case Study

INTRODUCTION

What’s the one thing that has a guaranteed effect on fixing your mood as well as giving you energy? Sweets! Desserts, ice creams, candies — industries and stores producing these items thrive on our innate craving for something sweet and filling. One of these is Candy Cloud Factory — a popular dessert bar in Bangalore primarily focussed on cotton candy. With their cheerful pink and turquoise themed interiors, cutesy decor and the 24/7 effervescent vibe, this dessert bar makes you feel like you’ve stepped into Disneyland — while whipping up some delicious and unique cotton candy based desserts.

About the Client

On a typical day, the founders of this venture came across an Instagram video of a cotton candy burrito. Inspiration struck, epiphanies followed and Candy Cloud Factory was born. They, along with a few friends and family members, turned their vision into reality when they went ahead with their inspiration and set up their store in 2019 in Koramangala. Their aesthetic and Instagrammable interiors — designed in bright variants of blue and pink — quickly became the talk of the town. The real catch, of course, were the desserts themselves — strawberry ice cream + candy floss, cotton candy affogato, bubblegum soda with cotton candy, and so on.

Goals

The goals for this client were quite straightforward — being a new and fresh startup, gaining popularity and getting customers was the most crucial task after first setting up smooth internal organisation and functioning.

1. Aim to become the go-to dessert bar/ice cream parlour for the fast moving student crowd of Koramangala, Bangalore
2. Utilising social media tools to boost their name and reputation, while achieving greater reach and thus getting more orders
3. Maintain consistent and regularly updated profiles online that capture the client’s uniqueness to ensure that people choose Candy Cloud Factory as their primary choice for desserts and the like.

Challenges to Overcome

As a new venture, everything from the smallest way of marketing their business to staff training and photography was a hurdle to overcome and a challenge to master. These were the things we handled for them:

1. Posts
2. Photography
3. Social Media
4. Internal store management
5. Staff training
6. Inventory management

Execution

Vartalaap’s involvement in these core tasks led to augmented outcomes of some of the most crucial factors for the development of Candy Cloud Factory.

Results

• 1,374% growth in photo views, leading to heightened engagement
• 50% growth in total searches online: 3321 more searches than before
• 382% growth in UGC
• 40% increase in listing views
• 163% growth in people searching for the product: 2,210 more than before
• 5% increase in CTA (call to action) of maps: people asked for directions and enquiries
• 21% Growth in google name searches: 1,111 more than before engaging with us
• Content reach with Influencer handles of 50K followers in 24 Hrs

CONCLUSION

This served as an all-round and completely immersive experience for us on many levels of our job as a branding and marketing firm. Candy Cloud Factory, being a snack and food client, added to the versatility of the clients we have dealt with. Dealing with inventory management and staff training are always daunting yet very educational experiences, so they served as crucial learning steps in our journey towards being the go-to choice for brands to invent/reinvent themselves and move on to a higher level of success.