Winkler, a company headquartered in Berlin and manufacturing operations in Hamburg and Stuttgart, Germany, is a manufacturer of packaging materials for the electronics, office products, houseware, and food industries. Small, medium, large, and extra-large sized fiber containers used for packaging snack food products (nuts, potato chips, candies and a wide variety of bakery items) in one of Winkler's product lines. The containers come with metal ends and can have attractive, multi-colored, printed designs on the labels to meet customer specifications.
Direct sales to large food companies with branded products, made up a major portion of Winkler's fiber container sales. Orders from Basler, Reckmann, Morick, Hansert, and Niemann (food processing companies) made up over half of Winkler's fiber containers sold last year. Basler produced 75% of its own fiber container requirement while the others use Winkler as a single source supplier. Grocery chain accounts list like Kaufhof and Helco, and processors who sell to the grocery chains such as Hess account for the remaining sales.
Winkler's Hamburg plant has four major customers, who place differing requirements on manufacturing. As shown in Exhibit 3 in the case, each of these customers have different order winners and order qualifiers. The Stuttgart plant, on the other hand, serves a more varied market and as seen from Exhibit 2 is a higher volume sales producer. Many of Stuttgart's customers are high volume customers who have price as their strongest OW. The market segments based on customer characteristics are shown in Tables 1a and 2a for the Hamburg and Stuttgart plants respectively.
Winkler recently undertook three major Marketing Initiatives, which incl ...