The Brownie Factory
The Brownie Factory 1. Critical Underlying issues to address for developing the market strategy: a. Resource Utilization: there is a number of resource utilization aspects that the couple need to address to come up with the best market strategy. a. Time: the couple is working more than 8 hours per day each. In addition they seek for help from their friends. In order to prepare the marketing strategy they should look for the best solution that may reduce the number of work hours needed. They can reduce this by more utilization of their equipments, hiring a number of employees, maintain the cleanliness of their kitchen while eliminating the work hours required, eliminate the problem of “switching over products” by creating the best work process flow design. b. Maximum use of equipments: To have the best bakery product, Terry makes less use of equipments at their disposal and more use of hands to mix the ingredients. This enhances the quality of the bakery items but does not make the most use of the equipments that they have purchased. b. Variety vs. Specialization: The case mentions that the bakery produces a number of products that do not yield much profit. They produce it just because they cannot turn down the request of their regular customers. In addition, if they want to be just the manufacturer of Brownie, they need to see if such a transformation is possible and profitable for long term c. Quality: The bakery makes use of the high cost ingredients and hand mixing approach to get the best product. The Mission of the bakery (of the couple, of course) is to be a high quality bakery item manufacturer. However, I believe the high price that they charge the customers is hindering in the high sales of their product as well as restrain them from taking the project from the FSP. They need to cater this issue and come up with some better solution where they have low cost but maintain the quality. d. Avoiding marketing myopia: the