Essay on Kudler Fine Foods Strategy

The American Marketing Association defines marketing as "an organizational function and a set of processes for creating, communicating and delivering value to customers and for managing customer relationships in ways that benefit the organization and its stakeholders". (2005) Simply put, marketing is the process by which businesses assess the needs and desires of consumers in order to provide products and/or services to meet those needs in the most efficient and cost effective manner. Truly effective marketers do market research in an effort to understand their target market and create marketing strategies based on the characterization of those in the target area.

Partners in the scheme can avail themselves of a much richer databank on their customers, analyzing their purchases across a cross section of different products, purchased in many different outlets.

The process management at Kudler Fine Foods desires for ongoing progress and also growth and this must be designed in a manner in which reduces risks. Here are several guidelines to reaching that long lasting goal regarding progress and accomplishment of Kudler Fine Foods. Using a mixture of the a few different methods gives Kudler Fine Foods the best chance of a prosperous growth ("Kudler Fine Foods", 2011).

Kudlers’s new initiative is tracking purchase behavior at the individual customer level and providing high value incentives through a

Next the evaluation of current and future opportunities available to Kudler Fine Foods would want to be evaluated. These opportunities could include technology upgrades, market positioning, diversification, or any other related areas. During this evaluation it might be useful to gather information from industry experts or consultants (MacVicar, 1996).

Kudler Fine foods would like to enhance the clients shopping experience by developing a system in order to track the customer purchases which will be known as a Frequent Shopper Program. This will award loyalty points in order for the customer to have an opportunity to redeem these points for goods services. “Kudler Fine Foods is a Local upscale specialty food store committed to providing customers with the finest selection of specialty foods and wine.” Apollo Group Inc. (2010) this will keep track of the customers purchase habits in order to assist Kudler to offer their customers and valued

The intent behind the development of Kudler Fine Foods Frequent Buyer Program is to increase the level of customer loyalty. The system will be broken down into two different levels; the frequency of a buyers shopping with Kudler Fine Foods and the amount of money that the buyer spends with each purchase. A program like this is typically used as a marketing strategy that is “enabled by point-of-sale technology to record and store customer purchases in exchange for rewards’ (Appel, p. 156, 2006). A web-based shopping program will be used to enhance the Frequent Buyer Program for Kudler Fine Foods.

Kudler plans to expand these areas in the future, providing a multitude of specialized classes to its loyal customers. Offering cooking classes in many areas of the store makes customers more interested in shopping the store and learning new techniques in cooking healthy fares for their families. In addition to offering these classes, the employees are to be cross trained in many areas to provide a pleasant shopping experience for Kulder 's customers. The customers will also be provided with brochures of the dishes they will learn in the store that will provide the recipe and food suggestions that will go with the main dishes taught in the class. This suggestive information has been proven effective in marketing strategies; therefore, Kudler will use this suggestive marketing technique to increase the buying desires of the customers.

Kudler 's Fine Foods has been in business for over 15 years. Staying in business in this economy is impressive. Kudler’s has done everything necessary to grow and continue to be a productive company in the last 15 years. The products and merchandise that Kudler’s sells are perishable food and wine products that continually need to be monitored and inventoried to make sure that the product is always fresh. Kudler 's stakeholders are the staff, customers, suppliers, banks and the owner herself.

By observing the purchases made by the customers, and examine the contracts with the distributors, Kudler Fine Foods could cut down on the frequent ordering of products, giving Kathy more time to concentrate on other functions of the business.

With up to date analysis of competitors marketing strategy and tactics Kudler can keep its own marketing strategy and tactics prepared to do whatever is necessary to market better quality and win the satisfaction of consumers over its competitors. Whether it is producing a larger selection of wines, expanding its bakery products, finding new ways to make its meats and seafood tastier than its competitors, or even lowering prices, Kudler can lower its prices to gain market advantage only if it has up to date information about competitor’s prices. Same with its products, Kudler can only differentiate its products if it knows sufficient information about competitor’s products (Business Marketing Plan.net, 2011).

Kudler Fine Foods should upgrade to a system that has bar-coding and is linked to inventory. This system would be beneficial for any business in stocking food, clothes or any other inventory item. The barcodes on each item will keep your inventory records, starting from the point they are received into inventory and the moment they are purchased. With the bar-coding there is a set price for each item and will be automatically linked to the software used by Finance and Accounting. This system could get rid of the excel sheet tracker for inventory and can get rid of any potential transpost errors made by manually entering inventory. Major grocery stores are equipped with systems such as bar-coding and inventory control.

Kudler Fine Foods has continued to grow and is now poised to make significant internal changes to increase revenue and customer satisfaction. Kudler Fine Foods is a gourmet grocery store and recent market surveys have shown they have continued to exceed customer 's satisfaction in every area except one: the cost of merchandise. By exploring ways to reduce costs Kudler Fine Foods will experience an increase in customer satisfaction.

Kudler also has also expressed the desire to make the website easier to maintain. Currently, with the website in its hard coded state, making small changes can turn out to be a fairly difficult. Ultimately, Kudler Fine Foods would like to add additional functionality of allowing users to browse store inventory online and perhaps shop online. However, this does require that Kudler 's current website be redesigned in order to facilitate ease of ongoing maintenance of inventory since the current design, while capable of providing such functionality, would require tremendously more laborious effort to maintain.

Kudler Fine Foods currently has three locations-La Jolla, Del Mar, and Encinitas-throughout San Diego, with a fourth location possibly in the company’s near future. The company maintains several systems including strategic plan, legal, finance and accounting, sales and marketing, human resources, and operations. This paper is an analysis of the marketing system for Kudler Fine Foods, and touches briefly on the company’s background and strategic plan.