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Micaela Lueders
Moffatt
Principles of PR
December 14, 2016
Final Paper
Sift Dessert Bar

Client

Sift Dessert Bar is located in Sonoma County, California. They are locally owned

and operating since 2008. They have five locations throughout the Bay Area, from larger

cities, such as San Francisco and Napa, and smaller community-based locations, such as

Petaluma and Cotati. They also gained national prestige by winning the Food Network’s

Cupcake Wars in 2011 and have since appeared on two more episodes as returning

champions. Their current menu consists of cupcakes, macarons, ice cream sammies,

cookies, whoopee cookies, cakes, and cruffles. They also cater events and weddings with

a selection of customizable desserts. Their current mission statement according to their

website is, “Through each bite we strive to provide a top-quality customer experience

with our creative desserts that put the cherry on top of all expectations. We help make our

guests the life of the party!” Their core values instilled within their company are, “1.

"Cherry on Top" Quality and Customer Experience, Creative, and Compassionate.”

These characteristics embody Sift Dessert Bar to be vibrant addition within Sonoma

County, but they do have some issues that when solved could expand Sift Dessert Bar’s

presence within the community.

Situation Analysis

Sift Dessert Bar, while being a fantastic dessert location, has limited notoriety

within various publics and lacks a strong community presence. Being a dessert bar, they

encounter some stereotypes that could limit their potential audience base. The goal of this
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plan is to increase and broaden the customer base and increase the notoriety of the

organization within the community and to potential tourists. The key message for this

campaign will be, “Sift is a modern dessert bar for everyone and is a vibrant attraction

within Sonoma County” which will be the underlying premise of the entire campaign.

External Environment

The operating environment for Sift Dessert Bar is as diverse as their location base.

As they have locations ranging from big cities and small town communities, the

economic competition varies. According to Google, they are more than fifteen cupcake

and dessert shops in San Francisco alone. Their location is competing with these other

companies to grab the customer’s attention and maintain a loyal fan base. However, in

their smaller town location of Petaluma, they only three competing dessert businesses.

However, their audience base is smaller than the massive city of San Francisco. Petaluma

has a lower competition than the San Francisco location, but it also has a lower customer

base. This dichotomy of economic conditions affects Sift Dessert Bar, but high

competition within higher population is to be expected. The social climate surrounding

Sift Dessert bar is that cupcakes are on trend. Due to the recent rise of such shows like

Cupcake Wars, this hype around dessert specified locations has dramatically increased.

Furthermore, the artistry of cake and cupcake decorating has shown an influx on social

media and is vastly celebrated online. According to Instagram, the hashtag #cupcake has

nearly 8 million posts. Cupcakes have skyrocketed to online fame due to such hype.

These factors affect Sift Dessert Bar as these directly influence customer and profit base

which ultimately determine the success of the organization.

Business Analysis
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The competition for Sift Dessert Bar are various other bakeries and dessert

locations. Sift Dessert Bar diversifies itself by offering a variety of unique flavors, such

as a bacon maple cupcake and a Guinness cupcake, and expanding beyond just cakes and

cupcakes. They offer cookies, ice cream sandwiches, and even macarons which is unique

for an independent dessert location. The opportunities for this organization to expand are

to have more of a community impact and notoriety among both high and low populated

areas. The threat for this industry is the fad trend of artistry desserts with eventually be

replaced by something else. The strengths of Sift Dessert Bar are that they are locally

owned and operated by a younger demographic. This younger group will help internally

implement this plan on social media as well.

Business Goal

The goal of this plan is to expand the customer base to have more demographics

and publics seek out Sift Dessert Bar. By maintaining a good reputation online and within

the community, this will attract more diverse customers to visit and potentially purchase

items from Sift Dessert Bar. This is the goal due to the increased fame surrounding

cupcakes has also limited them to a certain, stereotypical type of public. This stigma

limits Sift Dessert Bar’s impact within the community. Furthermore, by being a

destination for customers, it will appeal to tourists and other bystanders as a lovely,

worthwhile place to visit while in town.

Communications Objective

Communications will be the messenger in this plan to instill this plan within the

community and online. The objective will be increase positive awareness within the

community and potential awareness. To help implement this plan, it will utilize the Uses
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and Gratifications Theory and the Diffusion of Innovations Theory. According to Public

Relations: Strategies and Tactics, the Uses and Gratifications Theory states that media

consumers use the media to satisfy specific needs or desires. By having a positive and

updated media presence, Sift Dessert Bar will attract customers who are seeking out

desserts in the Sonoma County or Bay Area. The Diffusion of Innovation theory seeks to

explain how, why, and at what rate new ideas or technology spreads. By utilizing this

knowledge to see as culture and technology shift to accommodate and follow the other,

Sift Dessert Bar can monitor the popularity of desserts on social media, fully represent

their company on social media, and understand how the culture feels about desserts to

address any problems or trends as soon as they happen. These theories will help expand

Sift Dessert Bar’s audience base and maintain a positive attitude about this company.

Target Audience/Publics

This plan is targeting potential tourists who use social media, community

members surrounding the company, and men aged 18-35. By targeting tourists, it will

reach farther than just the community Sift Dessert Bar is a part of. By attracting tourists,

the positive attitude of the company will expand farther. By reaching out to community

members, it will strengthen the local good feeling about the company. Being a member of

a community is a powerful thing, and having a community stand behind you is also vital

in times of potential controversy. Having a community support is a backbone of

economic success and prominence with that community. Lastly, by reaching out to men

aged 18-35, this plan will target an under used area of the public to break stigmas and

expand the audience base of this company. These target audiences will shape this plan to

be beneficial for them and to elevate Sift Dessert Bar.

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Key Messages

As mentioned earlier, the key, base message for this campaign is “Sift is a modern

dessert bar for everyone and is a vibrant attraction within Sonoma County.” This

summarizes both objectives of this plan and accomplishes everything within the utmost

goal. These will keep everyone on the same page and everyone in line with Sift Dessert

Bar’s image.

Key Selling Proposition/Key Takeaway

The single idea people will take away from this project is how involved Sift

Dessert Bar is within the community, so much so that it attracts outsiders in an effort to

learn about the community, and does not conform to social stereotypes. While this is a lot

to take away, each goal ties in with each other to support the other.

Objectives

The objectives of this plan is to form a community and attract potential tourists

while also increasing and targeting the men ages 18-35.

Strategies

Firstly, to increase notoriety about Sift Dessert Bar, we will increase the social

media presence. We plan to accomplish this by starting a blog and increasing Twitter and

Facebook posts. The means to accomplish the blog will be on Sift Dessert Bar’s website,

and this will make Sift Dessert Bar more humanistic and less of a company. This

informal interaction will also keep people looking onto and coming back to their website.

The medium for social media interaction will primarily be Twitter and Facebook, and this

will hopefully also make Sift Dessert Bar more approachable. This will attract people to

the company as they get a sense of their values based off their online presence. In order to
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target men 18-35, Sift Dessert Bar hopes to connect sports with cupcakes and to de-

gender cupcakes. By connecting sports and cupcakes, this will reach out to men on their

environment. This will plant the idea of cupcakes being delicious into their heads on

their own field. The medium for this will mostly be in person and community events. By

de-gendering cupcakes, this will also help remove stigmas from buying cupcakes. The

medium for this will be primarily online and a video.

Tactics

To accomplish the blog engagement strategy, we plan to post recipes and ideas for

decorating goodies and posting photos from various catering events. These tactics will

help Sift Dessert Bar have a more personal online presence. It will also show how

capable and talented they are for future clients if they post about their catering endeavors

with pictures from events. For the social media based strategy, we plan to double Twitter

and Facebook posts and quadruple Twitter interaction with users and any online

mentions. Currently, their Twitter posts direct the user back to Facebook, and there is

limited original Twitter contact. Their Facebook primarily shows promotions. By

increasing original content for each social media that is not promotional, it will show that

Sift Dessert Bar is more than just a company. It will display the attitudes of the company

instead of just the products. By interacting with people more on Twitter, it will also show

how much Sift Dessert Bar appreciates and cares about their customers. The last tactic for

social media objective is to create a social media destination. Having a notable place on

social media that people associate with a certain location, it draws tourists in to go out of

their way to visit Sift Dessert Bar. By establishing a photography location and posting it
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around social media, it associate Sift Dessert Bar with Sonoma County. This attracts

tourists and invites members of the community to visit Sift as well.

The tactics for targeting men 18-35 demographic while connecting sports and Sift

Dessert Bar are to sell Sift Dessert Bar’s products at local sporting events and to sponsor

a local sports team. The goal for selling at local sporting events is to make the association

between Sift Dessert Bar caring about sports and to target this demographic on their own

environment. Also, by sponsoring a local sports team, Sift Dessert Bar shows how they

are invested within the community, has advertising on the shirts which a variety of

publics sees, and further connects sports with Sift Dessert Bar. The second strategy in

order to target men is to de-gender cupcakes will be to make a funny PSA video breaking

down and illustrating how limiting the stereotypes around desserts are and an online

campaign also supporting the video. The video will be a parody PSA explaining how

delicious desserts are and no one should be limited to enjoying them simply because

desserts are “girly”. This will hopefully be funny enough to be shared around the internet

and inspire more men to visit Sift Dessert Bar. The online campaign will supplement the

key messages of the video by further saying how men should also be allowed to enjoy

delicious desserts from stigma. The online campaign will be covered on all social media

accounts for at least 1-3 months with a minimum of weekly posts regarding the

campaign. This will gain awareness about Sift Dessert Bar and support the key message

of how the company is accepting of everyone because desserts are delicious and should

be enjoyed by all. The tactics will help support the ultimate goal and the key messages of

this campaign to accomplish the objectives.

Evaluation
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To evaluate the success of this campaign, we will monitor social media activity

and mentions to see if the attitudes of the company have changed since the start of the

campaign. We will also watch to see if an influx of tourists and community members tag

themselves on social media at Sift Dessert Bar. Also, we will see if an increased number

of men come to buy desserts at Sift Dessert Bar. If the community rises up to support

Sift Dessert Bar, they will successfully rise up to be an active presence within the

multiple demographics within of the community and attract outsiders to visit Sonoma

County.

References

There is no current way to cite a hashtag, but I just searched #cupcake on Instagram to

see the number of posts.

Cupcakes in San Francisco. (n.d.). Retrieved December 11, 2016, from

https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-

instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=cupcakes in san francisco

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Sift Dessert Bar. (n.d.). Retrieved December 12, 2016, from

http://www.bing.com/cr?IG=E1DB617CEE534D23968F9A9D32F31865&CID=2

0EC352AD8F96B7528433CC3D9C86A8D&rd=1&h=ae5R1Vmz1TQp7Wg67fV

-yX1rmuDSZBKM-

1QgX_0i43A&v=1&r=http://siftdessertbar.com/&p=DevEx,5085.1

Wilcox, D. L., Ault, P. H., & Agee, W. K. (n.d.). Public relations: Strategies and tactics

(11th ed.). New York: Harper & Row.