Reinventing a bakery through customer experience

The bakery sector in Portugal is stagnated, lacks innovation and professionalism; stores are quite homogeneous and few make efforts to get a competitive advantage. People lost the “ritual” of having breakfast or afternoon lunch outside. Many retailers closed doors in response to the decreasing consumption and excessive competition while others, with new value propositions, strive to differentiate and even charge premium prices. A Padaria is one of the recent success cases in this market, with a company-owned chain of bakeries wisely positioned in Lisbon, Carvalho, the owner, was able to recreate the “neighborhood bakery”. The aim of this thesis is to understand how A Padaria, without creating a new concept, managed to achieve awareness that makes clients line up at each store. During the case, the key success factors of A Padaria are explained with special emphasis on their communication and integrated value chain. The outcome of a cared publicity in the media is also discussed as well as the efforts made so the people knew a new bakery was coming to town: the word-of-mouth effect. Now with Lisbon served by 14 stores, comes the time to go further and reach other locations and the challenge arises: how should A Padaria expand? Franchising or wholly owned stores make the alternatives. In actual stores, sales are not bumping as before and Carvalho knows he needs to retain customers as A Padaria lost part of its novelty effect