Culinarian Cookware Case Study

1. The pattern for consumer behavior in the Culinarian Cookware products can be clearly identified with the information provided in the case. The current target market is conformed mostly by women (82% of their customers according to their consumer research are women) of 30-55 years of age. With relatively high-income levels and whose main hobby in life is cooking. As we can see the target market for this product is very specific and so is their purchasing process. These are customers that are fully aware of the characteristics they are looking for in their products, and who have a certain amount of experience utilizing the product. With these type of consumers, we can appreciate that the purchasing process is influenced by 3 basic characteristics …show more content…
In my opinion, the 2004 promotion was profitable for the company. The fact that they think it’s not is due to a misconception of the sales figures being too high. For the profitability indexes, we have that according to Brown’s logic, the sales forecasted should have been reduced by a 24% margin due to the previous year sales. (This is a misconception, because the sales for year 2003 were not altered by a price reduction.) In this case the sales would have been close to a total of 59,871$. Brown’s logic also mentioned the fact that they needed to include the costs of labor and raw materials to their projections in order to avoid miscalculations. The costs with those considerations included total an amount of 38.64. The last point in Browns analysis suggests that they needed to eliminate the cannibalization calculations from the projections, because there was no reliable way of calculating it. Below we can see a table depicting the comparison between the benefits of having no promotion or having the 20% promotion with Brown’s …show more content…
. In my opinion, Culinarian Cookware should offer a price promotion in 2007. I believe that a price promotion would give them the upper hand they are looking for in order to obtain more market share of the premium segment (which is one of the strategic priorities of the company for 2006) But they should focus their price promotions only in specific products that belong to the low-end category of their business and that have less sales. Their copper and premium products should remain within a prestigious price rate, so that the brand perception does not change and they don’t lose their market share. Increasing their sales of products that are not currently being sold as much as they would want to could provide a new variety of customers that could experience the high quality and durability of Culinarian cookware