Differentiating Between Market Structures

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Kudler Fine Foods is the brain child of Kathy Kudler. She envisioned a one stop gourmet food store and has grown to three locations to date. She continues to maintain direct control over large bulk purchase order items, stringent customer service policies, and hiring. This paper discusses how the organization competes in the marketplace and the strengths and weaknesses of the company according to the marketing surveys their customers completed. The following also discusses which market structure best applies to the organization and how that structure positively and negatively affects the firm, how the effectiveness of the competitive strategies in the market structure affect the …show more content…

A positive effect of this market structure is the overall profits. These profits, for the growth purposes of Kudler Foods, could be used for technological advances so they may offer improved products, costs, prices, and allow them to stay ahead of the competition now and in the future to maintain long term profitability.

Recommendations

A firm recommendation is further train employees to enrich operations and increase customer service. Employees are certainly knowledgeable, as per the marketing survey results, but could use some additional training in increasing customer service skills. This could be accomplished by hiring an expert in the field to come in and teach service skills to the employees. To ensure the skills are used, Kudler Foods could tie a small part of the employee’s compensation to good reports from customers.
In addition, Kathy Kudler is making plans to introduce new e-commerce capabilities as well as a catering link on the new website slated for launch in June 2004. These steps will add automation to inventory ordering and reach potential customers outside of the geographical area they currently service ("Kudler Fine Foods | Administration: Strategic Plan 2003", 2013). The use of e-commerce will showcase strengths and perhaps give sustained competitive advantage. This new automation will also allow cash flows to go to the geographical expansion Mrs. Kudler wishes to achieve