Is Kinder Surprise sold straight to supermarkets as we think?

It may seem that Kinder Surprise does not have B2B relations, but this is the part that requires investigation and those B2B partners do exist, in fact, there are many of them. On (Ferrero Russia, 2016), they state that they develop a suitable packaging for the products in order to attract more attention to their partners from the side of consumers. Ferrero is ready to offer their services in different sales channels: coffee companies and fast food, restaurants and bars, hotels, schools and universities, catering and offices, traveling spheres (Ferrero Russia, 2016).
What exactly are business markets? There are 4 types of them: producer, reseller, government and public sector, institutional markets (Renssen, 2016).

Ferrero company is based in 53 countries and its products are present, sold, directly or through authorized retailers (Ferrero, 2016). This and before stated statements, confirm that the company has business to business relations and in this case it’s a reseller business market.

As for producer business market (or industrial), these are suppliers of raw goods for Kinder Surprise (Ashe-Edmunds, 2016), for instance flour, eggs, milk cocoa. Their suppliers usually do service, plant maintenance and production systems checks (Ferrero UK, 2016).

Kinder Surprise is being sold since 1974. During this period of time the product has been adapted to the business market. Adaption process involves maintenance of specific level of quality and repetitive usage of the same raw material suppliers, for example. They only buy from suppliers that have won their trust (Ferrero UK, 2016). The cocoa that is used for Kinder Surprise and other products of Ferrero has been known and used in Central America for thousands of years (Ferrero UK, 2016).

There are three types of business purchases: new task purchase, modified rebuy purchase or straight rebuy purchase. I think that straight rebuy purchase is most likely to be used for the product, as there are relatively the same amounts of raw materials purchased every period (week, month, etc.). New task purchase might take place when there are new resellers who would like to order Kinder Surprise.

Describe the buying center and the buying process for your product in a selected business market – reseller.

Case: Kinder develops a new Christmas packaging of different types and overall looks.

1.    Determining who potential customers are and what they require. (In this case, a decision-making unit will be choosing from already existing customers and their likelihood of buying Christmas tree carton Kinder Surprise packs).

2. Deciding how many and locating where they are (After the decision unit is done their research, and after contacting them to know their interest in the new product, they will count the number and estimate everything according to the location).

3. After this, they discuss the features of future contracts.

A buying centre in this case is a decision-making unit of Kinder which requires to do a research on already existing customers and their possible interest in new Kinder Surprise products.

Derived demand – when the amount of good being ordered depends on the size of raw material suppliers. This takes place when one of the Kinder Surprise suppliers (supplier of cocoa, milk, salt etc.) has some delivery problems from other countries and automatically they cannot produce as many products as they usually do and they have to lower the amount of the deliveries to their resellers for some time. In the best case, the usual supply will come back to its normal flow, if not Kinder will be using a lot of money as well as the resellers. However, for some resellers it might be not that affective as for the company itself, unless it will take a lot of time.