1. Describe consumer behavior in the cookware market. How is cookware bought and sold? What are the implications for Culinarian’s marketing strategy?
The data says that majority of the consumers were passionate cooks and they preferred quality as the most important attribute. The consumers in the cookware market comprised of a majority of middle aged people, and majority were women.
When it comes to buying, a large chunk (55%) of customers bought it for gifting. This means it was not bought as a usual buying for their homes. They found cookery utensils to be gift items on occasions like wedding, Christmas, etc. Hence, there is a reasonable increase in sales in the month of May-June as well as December. Hence, the cookery items were also believed to be seasonal items.
If they were to buy it for their homes, customers bought those which matched the interiors of their homes. So they preferred aesthetics of the cookwares.
Whenever the discounts were given, a significant increase in sales was observed.
Half of the people bought only those brands which they knew about. So this left a lot to do for promotions and advertising team of all companies. This is due to the fact that the customers preferred quality, features and price of cookware the most among the other factors.
Culinarian focused more on channel promotions and hence did not spend much on the mainstream advertising as in TVs and other mainstream media. They promoted their premium products mostly through the Magazines which targeted higher class people. This led to a low popularity of the middle and lower range of products of Culinarian and lower awareness among people. Since most of the customers felt brand is a very important factor while buying these products, Culinarian lost out on many of the customers. But, since Culinarian advertised itself through some cookery shows, it had created its own space