Kraft Foods

Kraft Foods, one of the largest food manufacturers in the country, accomplishes its goals of the customer attraction, retention, and solving customer complaints through several means. According to Eccles (1981) customers prefer flexibility in their product and service offerings. Flexibility in product and service offerings not only provides the options to customers to choose and select only those products and services that best meet their needs but it also facilitates the process of customization and personalization.

Similarly, Porter (1980) argues that in the present dynamic environment, a number of firms are shifting their focus from transaction-based interactions to relationship-based interactions. Since a firm usually incurs far more money in attracting a new customer than maintaining an existing one, it is always beneficial for the firm to lock- in its existing customers by developing close relations with them. In this perspective, businesses are encouraged to take notice of the customer's life cycle.

In other words, it is no longer sufficient to create a transaction with a customer; rather, the firm should decide to capture customers over their life times to decide what they want and how to deliver those products and services to them. In this stage, it is important that a firm places critical information in its site that is easily accessible to the customers. Customer acquisition is considered the prime objective of the company.

Using the above line of thinking, First of all, Crafts Food work on the basis of the cross-functional teams, which is used to identify and meet on the needs of these specific customers. The use of cross-functional teams helps Craft Foods in recognizing the customers' needs in products and create opportunities at modifying products and packages to meet the customers' needs. Also, Kraft looks for making long-term relationships with it larger consumer groups, because Craft Foods believe on the positive aspect of customer loyalty.

For example, Kraft foods looks for several options in selling its products in single packs, smaller-sized offerings, or larger-sized offerings and multi-packs. All of these strategies help Craft Foods in customer acquisition, retention, and making long-term relations with customers. Also, Craft Foods tries to attract customers by using innovation and focus. Innovation is related to producing new kind of offerings for that delights them.

In innovating new products, Craft Foods take a team-oriented approach, assembling the people from marketing, marketing information, R&D, operations, sales, new product development, finance and other functions, as needed. This team approach facilitates successful commercialization and promotes an integrated approach starting from insight to innovation to sales that generates the growth. The focus relates to the use of customer experts, selling teams, and marketing resources to ensure the use of multi-packaging programs to create new customers and retain the existing customers (Roberts, 2003).

In addition, Craft Foods takes extreme measures in market research to understand customer segmentations, their demographics, and behaviors, because Craft Foods expects to meet the demands of these segments through configuring packages as to satisfy the demands of these segments. In addition, Craft Foods looks for different means to attract large consumer groups, by using the concept of modularization of the packages.

By modularizing its products and offerings, a firm can often configure products and services into different standard customized forms, as Jarillo (1980) posits that by configuring its products and services a company can often gain advantages in cost and efficiency. Traditionally, a firm would carry most of its activities under a single hierarchical umbrella. However, in fast dynamic environments, these kinds of hierarchical structures are slow to respond to customers' queries. Moreover, in fast and dynamic environments, a vertical structure becomes unreliable to offer the latest development in products and services.

The systems integration between two or more firms is a better alternative to deal with this kind of environment because a network can be considered as the form of quasi-market mechanism that allows the advantages of the hierarchy through control of the market in production (Eccles, 1980). Therefore, the idea that Craft Foods uses is the concept of the value chain analysis in attracting and retaining customers. By using the concept of the value chain, Craft Foods ensures that it become responsive to customers and meet their demands quickly.

By being responsive to customer needs, the Craft ensures the value of customer loyalty and referral for its excellent service. The value chain concept helps not only in satisfying the customer needs but also it helps in solving the customer complaints about Craft's products. It is quite important for Craft Foods because the value chain can be used for discovery and problem solving purposes.

By using different means to market its products and services, a firm can gain the efficiencies, as it is able to track the customers' willingness to pay for a specific product or service (Roberts, 2003). Moreover, the company can also compare the efficiency of different channels in marketing.