Starting A Business: A case study of Agege Bread and Slice Bread
Growing up, I lived with my parent in a community where slice bread wasn’t popular in fact, their buyers were mostly the Igbos and few people from other tribes who could afford it bought it and so, you will not see a store that sells slice bread on the street except for the bus-stops in the area.
One of the reasons for this is, they make low sales and the bread may turn out stale if nobody buys it and that’s a loss for the sellers, instead of stocking up your store and making a loss, they’d rather take it to the bus stop or the roadside where there is large pedestrian movement.
Unlike agege bread which had a large market, there is no street that doesn’t have at least 2 Agege bread sellers in the area. It’s cheaper for the regular man and comes in small sizes so you can buy and consume at once unlike the sliced bread that comes in a family size and is pricy. Meanwhile, slice bread has a better taste and quality than the average bread.
Partly because it’s cheaper and it also comes in smaller sizes there is a huge demand and of course, supply has to follow.
Probably from the pressure of the large market or their greediness to make more money, the quality of the agege bread dropped drastically but people still bought from them.
Fast-forward to some years after, someone introduced a new bread that had its bakery on the other side of the town and of course, by that time the people who couldn’t afford slice bread now have lesser responsibilities to cater for and so they can now afford to buy slice bread.
Fortunately enough, this bread was affordable and also had quality compared to our “ agege bread”. They made great sales and every corner you get to, you will find this bread.
About a year later, with no idea about what is happening, the new bread inflated the price of their bread and their quality also dropped, up to the designs on the bread bag, people(product users) stopped buying from them and the vendors stopped making orders.
Everyone resorted to agege bread, and a few months after, a new bread bakery sprung up in the community. quality was topnotch and very affordable, unlike the others.
Now everywhere you turn, you will be sure to get a piece of that particular community bread. They had already identified their target audience and knew how to design their products to meet the needs of their target audience.
I remember one day, I had gone past a store where I usually get the bread, I got home and realized I will have to go back to buy the bread. On getting back a few minutes after, the vendor told me that she just sold them all and consoled me with “You should have said you wanted to buy bread when you passed”. To show that the bread had an available market and there was a high demand for it as well.
As a business owner, or as an individual who is interested in starting up a business, there are a couple of things you should consider.
- Why am I starting this business?
- What do I want to achieve with this business?
- Who needs the product and the services I want to offer? Can they afford it?
- How do I reach my prospective customer?
- What can I do to convince/persuade them to buy from me?
- How do I design this product to meet their needs? You don’t want to create a product that will only generate money for you, add retention to it.
- How do I make a profit?
If you can answer this question, you can proceed to start up your business or become an entrepreneur.
Convincing them to buy from you has to do with marketing strategies. Like the story, I shared, the only marketing strategy they used was word of mouth and referrals. There was no social media marketing and the rest, probably because they are not looking to expand their market at the moment or they just don’t want to.
Mr A tells Mr B that I ate this bread and I enjoyed it, you should try it and that was how their fame started spreading. If you can identify who you want to sell to, you will know how to design your product and also how to sell to them.
*Agege bread is another name for unsliced bread in Nigeria.
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