Reference no: EM132172515

1. What is meant by the term “augmented products”?

2. What is the brand image that Dream Dinners has attempted to create and sustain?

3. What was the driving force behind the creation of the company, Dream Dinners?

Dream Dinners: Food-To-Go

Dream Dinners is a Washington-based, innovative food-to-go concept. The company is franchised around the country and collectively sells over 700,000 servings each month. At Dream Dinners, customers are able to put together a variety of meals that can be taken home and prepared in minutes. This approach provides a nutritious meal, saves customers time, and is convenient, while also helping families re-establish “dinner time” as an important social event. The value proposition in this product includes saving time, while providing convenient, nutritional family meals for customers. The Dream Dinners concept demonstrates the process of the total product offering and each of the steps in the process.

This business concept evolved from the experiences of a group of women friends who met monthly to cook dinners to place in freezers to help each other out. The group did this for about seven years before launching the business model. The driving force behind the concept is to reemphasize the value of family time at dinner. Providing customers the ability to assemble a month’s worth of dinners would save tremendous time at home and would allow for more quality time to be spent with family members. The company describes its core demographic as women with school age children.

Dream Dinners seeks to influence how its customers value its product. The company discovered that its best marketing promotion comes from social media and word of mouth of customers who are in the stores—a satisfied customer tells her friends and so on. Customers perceive value from a product by weighing the benefits they expect from the product and the cost of receiving those goods. The importance of listening to the customer is critical to success in today’s competitive marketplace. The video explains how Dream Dinners engages in the product development process through growing its markets by offering environmentally friendly products. To this end, Dream Dinners provides 3-4 new dinner options each month. The company gauges its business success through a pricing model that is based on a cost-plus margin.

Success is defined as an average dollar ticket that consists of a customer spending a minimum of $150 per month by assembling 6 full-size dinners or 12 small-size dinners. The company has four key principles that it uses to assess its overall effectiveness. These principles are: (1) that the meals are easy, wonderful, and delicious; (2) that customers have a great experience in the store assembling meals; (3) that the menu items are easy for the store owner to provide; and (4) that the menu items are acceptable to the home office. The key differentiator for Dream Dinners is the quality of the food when compared with competitors.