Cookie Audit Reveals Balcom’s Quality Obsession

What takes a client meeting from good to great? Cookies. While this might be an excuse to satisfy our own sweet tooth, it’s become a beloved tradition at the agency to have custom sugar cookies at client meetings.

Balcom was easily purchasing dozens of cookies each month at $4 a cookie. We realized cookies were becoming a large expense and we needed to make sure we were handling our budget and brand well. It was time for a cookie audit.

What We Knew

  1. We love cookies. The custom “B” cookies are special to our agency and we needed to find a yummy and cost-effective way to keep them around.
  2. Several Fort Worth bakeries offer custom icing colors or logo designs on cookies for various prices.
  3. Taste and size are important. Cookies shouldn’t be intimidating. A client isn’t going to eat a GIANT cookie topped with icing that makes their tongue purple.

A team of Bs volunteered to head up the audit (but really, who wouldn’t?). We contacted three local bakeries, asking each one to bake a sugar cookie that included our colors and logo. Once the cookies arrived, the tough part of the job was underway: tasting each cookie and grading its pros and cons.

How We Graded the Cookies

  • Taste – We were looking for a homemade cookie. Balcom’s not all shiny bells and whistles. When you walk in our doors, you’re home – comfortable and welcomed, not cold and corporate. Our cookies needed to reflect this.
  • Brand consistency – Yes, we are a marketing agency, and we need cookies in our brand colors. But with brand colors like purple and green, we can easily look like Barney if we’re not careful!
  • Realistic – We want cookies that clients will really eat – not intimidating, but inviting. We pictured and discussed different clients eating our cookies. Would they be uncomfortable with cookie crumbles everywhere, or was the cookie a clean eat?
  • Cost – To avoid overordering, we knew we needed to be able to order as few as six cookies. Also, we were hoping to find cookies for less than $4 each.

Balcom Cookies

Cookie No. 1: Homemade taste, cost and ease to eat were perfect! The challenge was that the logo and colors looked nothing like our brand.

Cookie No. 2: Yummy but crumbly, this cookie was more difficult to eat and tasted much more like a bakery cookie than a homemade cookie. The brand logo was off as well.

Cookie No. 3: Sweet! The taste was more shortbread-related, making the cookie very heavy and dense – yet this bakery did the absolute best of matching our brand colors and logo.

“Use insight to reduce costs and enhance your brand.”

Balcom CookiesThe Winner

Cookie No. 1 – with a few adjustments!

Blue Bonnet Bakery swooped in and stole the show! Everyone agreed the taste, cost and ease to eat were perfect.

We had to work with them to get our colors just right, but they did it! We also had to brainstorm an option other than our logo, since the icing was a little too thin to get our “B” just right. Together, we were able to save additional dollars by going with a solid hexagon (our brand icon) with a solid icing color. Each cookie now costs $1.75. This will save the agency over $1,000 annually.

Balcom Cookies

The Lesson Learned

Use insight to reduce costs and enhance your brand. By spending a little extra time digging into our cookies, we found a cookie that clients would like more, and that benefitted our bottom line. Yes, you might think this is silly. But if we care this much about our cookies, imagine how much we care about our clients. 

Contact us to get this level of expert attention for your marketing plan.

Tags: Branding & Advertising

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