Customers’ Behaviour

Drawing on the assigned case article “Culinarian Cookware: Pondering Price Promotion,” this short essay firstly demonstrates the consumer behaviour in the cookware market and tackles how cookware is bought and sold, as well as what the implications for Culinarian’s marketing strategy are as follows. 

Customers’ behaviour

 On the one hand, it is able to understand the consumer’s behaviour by looking at the buying pattern in the Culinarian Cookware market. The customers’ purchase habit is divided into two ways—single piece purchase or boxed set purchase. Purchased in either ways, the cookware is more likely to be bought during the wedding season from May to July and the Holiday season from November to December. During these peak seasons, there is a large amount of cookware that was bought as gift. Besides, it is considered that the customers’ purchase is judged by the qualities and the features rather than the price and brand name. However, sometimes brand awareness may serve as an important factor to influence the customers’ purchase behaviour, too.

The selling pattern, on the other hand, also explains the customers’ behaviour. For example, it is investigated that there are 32 per cent of the cookware are sold in the mass merchandisers. There are 29 per cent of the products are sold in department stores and 24 per cent in Kitchen specialty stores. Others such as direct TV sales and Internet merchandising only account for 15 per cent of the market. Therefore, by examining these numbers, it is able to tell that the customers still prefer to purchase cookware at where they can literally see and try the products. Besides, the colour design served as a selling strategy also influences the customers’ behaviour for that there are more and more premium cookware consumers choosing the cookware according their kitchen décor. Another selling strategy is that Culinarian seizes the costumers’ endorsement of celebrity chefs.

As a result, according to the investigation, the majority of Culinarian’s customers are from the households having income of more than $75,000, and most of them are women. These phenomena are highly related to the selling strategies. It is because the households that those women came from are more likely to have customised kitchen décor. To sum up Culinarian’s buying and selling patterns, one can implicate that the Culinarian’s marketing strategy is to develop into a premium performance cookware manufacturer.

Strengths and Weaknesses

So as to reveal why the company has been successful, this essay hereby excerpts the case study and lists Culinarian’s strengths and weaknesses by examining the marketing strategy it took as follows. The strengths are (1) market leader in premium segment; (2) strong revenue growth; (3) strong brand equity; and (4) extremely robust sales force. The weaknesses, on the other hand, are (1) being unable to answer its retailers demands; (2) being unable to increase the distribution network; (3) failing in price promotion; and (4) wasting outlay to pay for the flawed advertising expenditure.