Kudler Fine Foods Case Study

Kudler Fine Foods (KFF) was created by Kathy Kudler and has three retails stores in Southern California. This specialty store focuses on providing customers with the finest selections in foods, wines, and, related needs. More specifically, KFF offers a gourmet selection of seafood, meats, wines, produce, baked goods, and dairy products. Teamed with a wide array of fine products, KFF selects team members carefully, employing a friendly, knowledgeable staff.

The company has grown significantly and is focused on expanding services, improving efficiency of daily operations, as well as increasing the consumer purchase cycle. KFF has used market surveys as a method of market research to determine the customers level of satisfaction. In 2005 and 2006 surveys were administered with the following content; store hours are convenient for my shopping needs, store atmosphere and decor are appealing, a good selection of products was present, the merchandise sold is a good value for the money, merchandise displays are attractive, I am very satisfied with the merchandise I bought, the customer service representatives were very courteous, the customer service representatives were very knowledgeable, and, overall I am very satisfied with the store. Each item was to be rated based on the following responses; very strongly agree, strongly agree, agree, disagree, strongly disagree, or very strongly disagree. The company’s intranet website shows the results of past customer satisfaction surveys.

Overall, the responses from the surveys improved over the two year period, however it seems as if there is a lot of room for improvement. In both surveys, customers were dissatisfied with the attractiveness of the merchandise displays. Customers also felt that the customer service representatives were not knowledgeable. In the second year, the customers seemed generally satisfied with the store and its prices. One of my concerns in looking at the surveys were the amount of responses received. I feel that a larger amount of people should have been surveyed to get a more accurate response. I also would like to see more elaboration on the products that KFF customers would like to see in the stores. In both surveys, the product selection question could use improvement. If customers aren’t completely satisfied with the selection of products, KFF should focus more on that.

KFF has implemented a frequent buyer rewards program that will offer loyalty points while tracking customers purchase behavior. This program should benefit KFF in that it will give the store a better understanding of what customers are buying. Customers will benefit from this program by earning points which can be redeemed for high-end gift items.

Another area of marketing that KFF will be focusing on is advertising with media channels such as the radio, newspaper, television, events, sponsorships, and public relations. KFF will be offering in-store parties that show customers how to prepare specialty foods. The anticipated benefit of these demonstrations will be for customers to purchase more high margin food and beverage items. KFF also hopes to attract a larger target market by word of mouth advertising