A number of people recently completed a grocery store doughnut survey that was part of a marketing project for my MBA program. My team had been working on a project for Krispy Kreme’s off-premise business, so we were unable to reveal too much about the project until all of our MBA teams had presented to the company.
We crunched the numbers and are now in a position to reveal the results:
Using evaluative tools from our marketing analytics class, we constructed a positioning map. Essentially, each purple line represents a survey respondent and each blue line shows one of the five attributes in the survey. All four brands are here as well. What this showed us is that price and freshness were not as important to consumers as convenience, visual appeal and taste. Krispy Kreme is best positioned among the four brands we studied but could do even better if it can improve perception of the three main attributes.
A simple bar chart shows similar results. Krispy Kreme outperformed peers in four of the five categories. Only shortcoming was price, losing out to the store brand. All doughnuts struggled with freshness; it appeared as though they were being compared to a traditional doughnut.
Overall, we found that the Krispy Kreme grocery/convenience store doughnut was best-in-class among its peers though it still had some work to become the ‘idea'l’ in-store doughnut. It also seemed impractical to try and compete with Krispy Kreme’s ‘hot’ doughnuts sold in its own stores.
