brand-e

By Sally Ratcliffe. Cake, mix. There aren’t too many people who want to eat a knob of butter on its own. And Lurpak knows it. Butter gets on famously with other ingredients. So what happens if you mash the Danish spread with, say, sugar, flour and eggs?
Well, then you’ve got some cake mixture going on, but still there’s a vital ingredient missing. The consumer is the most important part of the mix. Friends not only help in the eating, they get your Lurpak-made cake to go that little bit further, especially if they start a conversation on the brand. Hopefully the butter can tempt them into all sorts of baking, setting them off on a path of bake-offs, contests, parties and lots more chats.
And now the brand is taking this concept online. For while Lurpak packaging might still bear its marque of lurs – ancient wind instruments from the Bronze Age – on its silver foil, it is looking to adopt new ways to communicate.
After keeping an eye on various social media networks, Lurpak’s team noticed an overwhelming number of cake clubs springing up. This month, the brand launched the Bake Club, hiring digital communications outfit Outside Line to create the campaign.
The Bake Club is a hub in which people can organise and share their baked goodies. Members are called to task via an e-mail alert with a date for baking. The more people Bake Club members sign up, the more cakes they get to share. And clubbers can browse for inspiration, recipes and ideas as well as submit comments. And each week a new selection of images to celebrate the homemade are featured on the Bake Club gallery.
Lurpak offers lots of suggestions as to who might be interested: from “city slicker ‘Investment Bakers’, students living off ‘Baked Beans Again’, or music fans who want to ‘Bake Me Up Before You Go Go’; it’s entirely up to you.”
There are many sugarcraft and icing clubs online which display highly accomplished masterpieces. But Lurpak is not looking here. It hopes instead to see the return of authenticity in cake making and a connection to the brand which is about keeping it ‘real’.
Charlotte Buswell, brand manager at Lurpak views the interactive baking club as an opportunity “to bring people together to appreciate real baking, the good old stuff that involves burnt edges and gooey fingers.”
History has proven that cake-baking can make a great story which can be shared for a long time. There must be some investment bankers out there who are just as skilled as King Arthur was with his cakes? Let’s wait to hear news of this with an online blast from those lurs . . .