Baking it Down with Sugar Cookie Marketing 🍪
👋 Hey - Heather and Corrie here with the Baking it Down Podcast with Sugar Cookie Marketing (a group on Facebook full of sugar cookiers turned business owners).
🍪 We're here to help you rise with your reach, flood with new followers, bake up new ideas, and make that all-important dough (while makin' that dough - see the pun there?)
🤑. What’s it about? We’re a Facebook Group turned Podcast, Membership, Book Club, and Baking 101 that’s dedicated to assisting bakers in effectively marketing online to generate more sales and better manage their businesses.
🧠 With free Facebook Live classes, hundreds of resources, and thousands of like-minded bakers, there’s a lot to learn in "SCM" (aka Sugar Cookie Marketing). ️🎧 As an extension of our Facebook group, this podcast is here to let you learn by listening. 📈 We'll cover group topics, marketing trends, and more (leaving this wide open in case Corrie wants to start singing).
💸 We take the sweet art of selling online to the cottage bakery world with marketing methods that move products (and pastries).👂 So open up those glorious ear canals because we have a podcast! Just when you’ve thought you’ve “heard” it all with those marketing "miracle" twins (that's our last name - not a proclamation), we’ve got something just for you each week!
🥣 As a baker, you don't always have the luxury of two hands needed to scroll in Sugar Cookie Marketing Group or crack open a book in Sugar Cookie Bookies, but what you can do is listen (unless you're my kid asking “what’s for dinner” for the millionth time).
👐 Hands full of flour? No problem! 👍 18 dozen iced cookies due tomorrow? Let’s do this. The Baking it Down Podcast by Sugar Cookie Marketing is a weekly podcast geared toward helping you grow your bakery business - dropping (almost) every Tuesday.
📅 We choose a topic each week that's either something new and emerging in the world of social media or something that we saw in "The Group" that was a hot topic and we bake it down... I mean, "break" it down for you. 🗯️ What you can expect in the podcast is about an hour of chit-chat with the meat and potatoes right at the beginning of the episode.
🥔 That’s when we dive into the marketing topic of the week! 📞 Oh yeah, folks can call / text / email in with their questions too - a fun way to hear from other bakers out there.
Our promises to you:
1️⃣ We always make it clean = no cursing. We understand that you are busy and could be around little ones while also trying to get your weekly dose of business growth so we make sure that each episode would make our grandma proud and keep it clean so you can listen while also living your life.
2️⃣ We always make it fun. There’s a lot of negativity in the world so we try and make the podcast an upbeat and fun learning experience for you. I mean, we try to make the Instagram updates and changes as happy as we can, but come on Instagram! Give it a rest! No more changes!
3️⃣ Other than that, we take a positive approach to marketing We are also *not* professional podcasters. I feel like we need to say this because, hey, sometimes we get giggles! We do our best to extend our marketing knowledge to you all free of charge each week at the cost of listening to our higher-than-normal pitched voices and the occasional giggle spree.
4️⃣ You can find the podcast on all the major platforms and you can typically expect a new episode each Tuesday afternoon (unless life happens). We invite everyone to listen.
Either start from the beginning or work backward! The episodes don’t build off themselves so you won’t be confused hearing one before the other. You just might miss new Lives we mention but you can always catch the replay in the Sugar Cookie Marketing Group on Facebook!
Baking it Down with Sugar Cookie Marketing 🍪
244. Baking it Down - Good Cop, Bad Cop, AI Slop
🤖 Good Cop, Bad Cop, AI Slop - The good and the b-ai-d.
In this week's Baking it Down Podcast - Episode 244 - Good Cop, Bad Cop, AI Slop, we're takin' on the touchy subject of 👾 AI, aka artificial intelligence.
👮 Bakers are quick to police other bakers in the comment sections on posts that ask how bakers are incorporating AI.
🤬 "It's cheating!"
😠 "It's lazy!"
😤 "It's the easy way out!"
😡 "It's lying to your audience!"
🤬 "I'll NEVER use AI! It's hurting the environment!"
However, AI is creeping into more and more businesses as tools to help with copy, updating and post-processing photography, summarizing emails and increasing workflow, and creating websites and marketing materials - and for good reason. AI is a cost-effective way to minimize production costs and labor while also being, at this time,💸 free to use.
The topic of today’s podcast: ✅🚫 where is your personal line when it comes to AI integration into your bakery?
And if your line mismatches that of another baker's, does that make you morally superior, or is it a case of mistaken identity of the use of different tools - 🖨️ ie, a baker who uses Eddie and one who only hand pipes.
📏 Taking the example to the extreme - the baker who does “from scratch” and buys a box mix, the baker who makes the batter themselves, and the baker who raises the cow and churns her own butter. In all three cases, a baker was baking in the kitchen. Who is business savvy, and who is ethical - and who is allowed to play judge and jury?
👮 AI impacts trust.
And we agree - ⭐️❌❌❌❌ using AI to dupe your clients into thinking your skillset is better than you can produce is a recipe for disaster, upset customers, and bad reviews. ✋ However, you gotta consider the invisible hand of the market - it always sorts things out. If someone takes advantage of their client base, give it time - the bad reviews will direct clients elsewhere.
But what about AI just sprucing up the background image? We see a lot of bakers "okay" with this level of AI use, and it does help sell more product since better photos = better sales.
And then consider the even more blurry lines - when AI can recreate the style and skill of decorating you are at - is that a lie? Or is it using a tool to help you sell cookies you haven't baked yet that you can 100% reproduce?
👮 AI devalues the craft.
Using AI can be a shortcut that's not fair for bakers who have suffered through learning the basics of even more than just royal icing. Just 5 years ago, research for starting a business required a dozen Google searches. Ten years before that, you were at the library doing your research. And that's not fair.
But is it really not fair? 📚 Consider that Google replaced the library and the need to go to the SBA office to get a business license. 3-D printers replaced a large majority of metal cutters. 💻 Websites replaced a large need to work a vendor market. Suffering is par for the course when it comes to running a business, but as technology evolves, 🏆 there's no reward for doing it the hard way.
👮 AI is killing the environment.
💦 I'm just going to link to someone smarter than me on this - Why is Everyone So Wrong About AI Water Use?? by Hank Green - but if you make the "environmental claim" - 💧 and trust me, AI data centers are in Northern Virginia and they are u-g-l-y amd loud, but it's important to be informed on both sides of the argument. 🫧 "The video concludes that while AI data centers will use a lot of water, their projected increase in water use is small compared to existing industrial and city uses." That's YouTube's AI summary, ironica
