Putting .uk cheese on the map
When you think about cheese you probably think of France, Belgium or Switzerland. Or maybe even Germany. But what about Britain? We spend £2.8bn on cheese every year in the UK1, and our taste in cheese is getting more sophisticated. We ate 252,000 tonnes of Cheddar last year, and over 50% of sales were for Mature — we seem to love the strong stuff.
This change in our tastes is leading to a cheese revolution — small suppliers are finding more markets for their niche and heritage cheeses, not just in the UK but all over the world. Companies like Pong are putting British cheeses on the map. And their .uk website is leading the charge.
Pong was created by two friends in South England. Director, owner and founder of the business, Matt March Smith, said they saw a gap in the market that was not being met.
“The world of wine and chocolate has been really explored and there was a lot of competition there, but fine cheeses hadn’t been done very well on the Internet.”
“I used to work in digital marketing so I got used to examining opportunities for clients and markets,” he explained. “The world of wine and chocolate has been really explored and there was a lot of competition there, but fine cheeses hadn’t been done very well on the Internet.”
The artisan cheese industry, in which Pong dedicates itself, has only been in existence in the United Kingdom for about thirty years. Yet most retailers are famed for their delis on the High Street, leaving a gap online.
Pong have worked to exploit this gap and have used some clever techniques to do so. Their site is split into three different sections, a shop, a blog called The Big Cheese and an online recipe book. This one-stop-shop for cheese helps build their brand.
“We do this to widen what the Pong brand means to people,” March Smith explains. “It means people connect Pong as a brand with a wider context of cheese. It doesn’t necessarily mean they are going to buy, but if for example we brought out a recipe book, it would be a brand they would know and understand is the dominant cheese brand on the Internet.”
This brand has been specifically focused on the United Kingdom, and their .uk domain has been essential to this.
“All of our sales come in through our .co.uk site”
“All of our sales come in through our .co.uk site. That’s not to say we don’t have international audiences as well — we ship around the world. We send cheese to China for example and we send a lot to Europe. In time we may find we need to create those domains in those languages to stimulate more demand. But at the moment the first business strategy was to dominate the UK market.”
It’s a strategy that seems to be working. Pong’s business has grown 1000%, and March Smith now believes they are the largest brand for fine cheese in the UK. But their march continues.
“We’ve done this only in the small market we are in, but we want to grow the actual audience. There is still a huge amount of the UK public that don’t explore good cheeses. There’s still a huge audience to grow into, so that dominance is about creating new audiences as much as it is dominating the market that is there at the moment.
“We’ve grown every year, so as long as we keep growing it means we’re growing the size of the audience. Our brand awareness now is really good. A lot of people have heard our name, so we hope that comes with future sales.”
Pong. It’s a word that automatically makes you think of cheese. With the help of a .uk domain it is becoming synonymous with British cheeses as well.
This story is one of 30 celebrating the launch of .uk domain names in 1985. To read the others visit our 30 Years of .uk hub. To start your own .uk story check out www.agreatplacetobe.uk.
