Kathy Kudler is the founder of the Kudler Fine Foods which is an upscale gourmet food market. They specialize in many different things including bakery, meat and seafood, produce, cheese and dairy, and wines. Through the passion of Kathy she has created this market offering a pretty large variety of the freshest foods and the finest products at reasonable prices. To help out her customers she has also provided a staff that is very knowledgeable employees that are willing to help the customers out. Kathy has become successful because she has taken and combined affordability and convenience. As her business continues to grow she has plans to add catering services. One of the largest goals that Kudler has is to continue to meet customers’ needs. With catering services, Kudler is able to offer services that will assist with customers needs to be able to assist with large orders and get-togethers that customers are having. This will ease the stress of the customer by making it so that they will not have to make sure that the food is prepped and ready for the party which tends to take a long time. A definition of “Marketing Research” is the collection and analysis of information to assist in decision making. With Kudler there will be a lot of “Marketing Research” in order to determine if the catering business will be something that will be worth adding to their organization. If they would have just started a catering business then who knows if it would have taken off. On the Kudler website you can see that more marketing research is needed in order to determine a definite action to take. The surveys that were done were not adequate enough to get the information in order to determine where to go. In order for Kudler to be able to increase their customer satisfaction they are going to need to define the marketing problem. From what can be seen there is a problem with gathering research information in order to be able to expand their current service offerings. There are several different areas such as catering or starting to carry an organic food line that were in the research. One thing that people have started to do is to become more health conscious. They are always looking for thing that will help to keep them healthy or to be able to get healthy. As they start to do the research and see that organic foods are better to pick then they start to make the choices to start to buy them. From here they will start to shop at places that carry organic foods and this will help Kudler to be able to make that decision to start to carry organic foods. In the United States gourmet and organic foods markets are continuing to grow at a pretty fast rate. As these things continue to grow the trends will continue to help support Kudler to want to make the decision to carry organic foods. Kudler will need to have research done in order to be able to determine popular food items and recipes in order to be able to start their catering services. They will need to track items used for their onsite events and their top purchased items. This will help them to be able to determine what items should be put on the catering menus. As they continue to build their menu they can also be asking customers about the foods that are offered as well as what they would think about the catering services and if they would use the catering services. Throughout this process they also have other things that they have to start to look at. They will need to determine their inventory through the demand strategy as well as the pricing strategy. As new products and services are introduced Kudler will have to take special consideration with these successful tools. With gourmet items the price will increase slightly as the customers are paying for the quality of the products. Kudler will need to provide exemplarily services that focus on the anticipation of the customers needs and meeting their special requests. The quality of gourmet products that Kudler provides and the exemplarily service they will provide in their catering service will be higher priced than their competition. Touting the quality and services is going to be a very important thing for Kudler. This will be key because with their prices being higher than their competitors they will need to show why they are and that people are paying for great quality and customer service. Once people know that Kudler is better than they will be willing to go with Kudler and become loyal customers and continue to go with Kudler as well as spread the word about it. A key thing that will be able to help Kudler out as well is by their location. They will need to be able to see what their potential customers are going to be so that they can meet their customers’ needs. That will be a key to setting up their catering business. If they are able to identify this it will help their catering business take off and be successful. As great suggestion, because it will be so expensive to start, would be to start their catering business out of their original building. Promotion decisions are a big key to communicating the message to potential customers. Because Kudler has been in business this will be a great advantage to begin the catering section. The customers that are already loyal and know about the customer service and quality of the products that they will be more likely to be the first ones to try the catering services. Kudler will need to continue to focus on their customer as their main business. The profits from that will help to be get the catering business rolling. If they are to start to lose their customers now then that will hurt the business as a whole. At this time Kudler is barely utilizing technology to run their organizations and yet they continue to profit. Once they start to implement this technology, it will continue to improve their profits. Technology is expensive up front but it will be well worth it when they are able to track things better and start to show their top sellers easier. This will help them to track their sales for the catering choices. As Kudler continues to grow along with a long-term strategic plan and goals as implementation of short-term goals must be put in place. Focus must continue to be on the satisfaction of the customer, but other function of the business must not go by the way side, such as the monitoring of processes and procedures. After the implementation phase review and a look back has to be completed to ensure results were achieved and were the processes the most beneficial for the company over all. This could relate to the additions fo technology, less manual processes, more efficient tracking, increase measurements around customer satisfaction. Instead of continually adding additional stores and services, Kudler needs to also focus on the maintenance of internal factors.

References:
Advantages of Organic Foods. (2002 – 2007) Retrieved January 7, 2008 http://www.organicfoodinfo.net/
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