Kudler Fine Foods Project

PR Campaign-Kudler Fine Foods

Bill Hussey

MKT/438

October 31, 2011

PR Campaign-Kudler Fine Foods

As an organization Kudler Fine Foods is experiencing security issues associated with operating on the Internet. Learning Team A will act as the public relations team and will create and identify ways to address the issue. This paper will focus on the target audience for the public relations campaign, discuss ethical implications related to the public relation issues, develop a market research plan to support our PR campaign, analyze how the public relation campaign will affect the marketing function, and analyze the similarities and differences between proactive and reactive public relation.

Organization's Public Relations Issues

Kudler Fine Foods is experiencing security issues associated with operating on the Internet. One Public Relations issue that Kudler's is going to face is reassuring consumers the safety of their credit card information. Another issue is consumer privacy. The consumers will need reassuring that their home addresses were not accessed, keeping their privacy.

When Kudler's Internet was accessed, some of their accounts were gotten into. Kudler Fine Foods will have to reassure the company's product providers that the information of the provider's other consumers were not accessed because of to Kudler's security issues.

Both the consumers and the product providers will have to be reassured that safety has been taken to insure that this does not happen again.

Target Audience

Buyers and sellers are using the Internet to purchase and sell products more and more. In the United States alone, the Internet sales are increasing each year ("Nuwire Investors", 2006-2011). In 2000, the Internet sales were $30,000 billion and by 2009 it had increased to about $135,000 billion ("Nuwire Investors", 2006-2011). It is expected that 53% of the United States retail sales in 2014 will be from Internet sales ("Nuwire Investors", 2006-2011). It was with this type of information that Kudler Fine Foods created a website to start selling the products that is available at the stores. Kudler also uses the Internet for making purchases for each of the stores.

The target audience is those consumers that choose to shop online through the Kudler Fine Foods website. Another target audience is the companies that Kudler purchases from on the Internet.

Ethical Implications

Many people hear the name public relations, and they think people who clean up other's messes and are at times immoral and unethical. As anyone in the public relations field will say this perception couldn't be further from the truth, in public relations they deal with unethical and immoral situations all the time. Public Relations professionals every day have to face an ethical line of whether to tell the truth and to whom. Every person should fundamentally know that ethics has to do with telling the truth, some have even compared PR as akin to being a lawyer. Public relations is about devising a story and securing the facts to back up that story, creating details that should be show cased and displayed for all to see. Kudler Fine Foods is about quality and details in the food our stores carry, creating a campaign on the strengths of Kudler Fine Foods and what we bring to the table. At Kudler Fine Foods our PR department deals with ethical implications such as miscommunication, good and bad news to employees and the public, company crisis, and the morality of a course, and we envision the fallout. Miscommunication regarding our Internet security can be a tuff to deal with if the PR department at Kudler Fine Foods is receiving the wrong information it can spell disaster. Presenting one idea of what Kudler Fine Foods Internet security is about and the services we provide and the product we sell is important; if the PR department receives bad communication regarding all of this it can prove to be disastrous to employees, and the organization. The PR department at Kudler Fine Foods has to deal with good and bad news to employees and the public regarding when and if our Internet security was breached to accomplish this we have to make sure that the truth is always at the heart of our decisions. Tell one lie, and it will eventually come to the surface and bite back, communication about what we tell the public and our employees is critical and must be spot on. Details about what the public and employees need to know about the situation at hand is important getting it right the first time and being truthful about the situation is how the PR department at Kudler Fine Foods runs things. Company crisis is an important time for Kudler Fine Food's PR department to take over and show the organization that they can make a negative situation into a positive. By allowing the PR department to show case how Kudler Fine Foods will rectify our Internet security situation and make necessary corrections that will ensure the public and employees trust in Kudler Fine Foods. Ethical implications such as good and bad news to employees and the public, company crisis, and the morality of a course, and we envision the fallout, and miscommunication are all topics that Kudler Fine Foods PR department will have to deal with. Honesty and integrity is the best quality about Kudler Fine Foods and the PR department is no exception, Kudler Fine Foods is about high quality products our customer's love it is a simple concept but one that Kudler has adapted and lives by. Our Internet security is important to us and the ethical quality our customers expect surrounding their personal information is at the heart of every decision made by Kudler Fine Foods.

Market Research Plan

The first step of Kudler's marketing research plan is to check out its competitors strategies. Kudler's will look at how the competitors handle crisis, the image that they put forth, and how they create a relationship with customers. Kudler's can learn from similar situations that competitors may have gone through.

The second step is to choose the target market, which Kudler's did above. The third step is to investigate the consumer's sensitivity. However, consumers and sellers tend to have a high sensitivity to credit information being stolen, so in this case the sensitivity would be considered high.

The fourth step would be to notify the target market of what is missing. In this case, the missing element