hidden services Kinder Surprise provides

It seems difficult to discuss Kinder Surprise as a product offering services, because intangible products are considered to be services and tangible dominant products are classified as goods. As the product intended for consumers, it is considered to belong to consumer services and not to business services as it doesn’t not have any purpose to satisfy businesses. Consumer is the type of market Kinder Surprise serves.

Firstly, Kinder offers personal service, as it offers consumers an extensive range of toys which are inside Kinder, providing themed toys or those made for the population higher in age. Giving a possibility to buy the product in various package sizes can also be referred to providing personal service. Another service that Kinder Surprise manufacturer provides to a customer is entertainment. Although it cannot be fully accessed like that, but the main idea of a Kinder Surprise is to entertain children, bring some courtesy and delight. Service quality is a customer perception of how well a product meets their expectations (Dibb, Simkin, M. Pride, & Ferrell, 2012, p. 390).

Secondly, Kinder is a well-known brand with a good reputation. It provides assurance as a service quality where consumers can be absolutely confident they get what they want to.

Thirdly, as was already mentioned above, Kinder provides an opportunity for children to show themselves and their talents in drawings or by organising a competition for them. This is an example of empathy, when they care and provide individual attention to each child.

A consumer is not involved in the production process, so consumption of the service takes place separately from production. The services provider is the manufacturer – Ferrero company.

The nature of services has led the marketers to further adapt the marketing mix. There are seven characteristics of it, which altogether determine the level of the service provided to a customer.

Marketing mix for services (7P’s)

Component	Description
Product	Developing custom design for the packaging and the every toy inside a Kinder.
Promotion	Advertising is focused on characteristics that Kinder believes customer wants from its product. Kinder says: “It will bring joy to your child” or they also say “more milk, less cocoa”, where they emphasise their differential advantage.
Price	In general the price for a Kinder Surprise is higher comparing to its substitutes. However, higher price affects psychological behaviour of consumers, because they think Kinder is better than other substitutes. This is also related to the image of the brand Kinder. The entertaining services that Kinder provides for children reflects on the price of the product. Therefore, when discussing higher price of Kinder, we don’t think about services provided by the company which are included in the price.
Place/distribution	It is a low context service as service providers are separated from consumers by wholesalers (supermarkets, shops, etc.)
Process	The manner in which the service is processed becomes customer’s experience. The way the process takes place so it reaches the end customer. The goal of Kinder is to deliver a chocolate egg which is not broken to the wholesalers. After that, wholesalers play an important role on the customer, because their service/staff is important. Therefore it is not Kinder’s job to provide a service just before reaching the customer.
Physical evidence	Delivering a product in a suitably respectful setting. This includes décor, layout, appearance. For example, Kinder might provide additional printed highlighters for in-shop advertising. However, such do not exist, as Kinder products are just represented on a shelf.
People	Kinder provides a service of customer satisfaction. There is a number in each country to which you can call and talk to the trained staff of Kinder if something has occurred.

The tendency of people buying Kinder Surprise is also likely to change if it happens that a consumer, in this case a child, is not satisfied with the toy a couple of times in a row. To ensure that the possibility of a consumer liking the Kinder Surprise toys is as high as possible, the company should always know what is popular in the market, such as movies, cartoons other toys so they can attract the larger number of buyers. More customer contact will improve this aspect.

Kinder might introduce something like questionnaires, which they can send to their customers by e-mail asking about their favourite character. This can be done as a set of multiple choice questions. By doing so at least once a month in different manners, Kinder can improve its sales by knowing what the customer preferences are.

Another idea, is for Kinder to develop their apps. There is an app where a child can create his own character to play. It could be interesting if a child could add all the toys he has to the collection so he can play with the Kinder toys not only in the real life but also virtually. In the digital era it will become extremely popular.

Knowing from my personal research, Kinder provides a service to the chains of bakeries and cafes by selling pastry products. However, it could be nice if Kinder opened its selling points offering all the chocolate products plus other products they provide to their B2B consumers.

There are certain characteristics that can be used to evaluate the degree of product’s quality. For instance, one of the qualities, intangibility, involves difficulty in evaluating, accessing, feeling before the purchase. Applying it to our product, we do not know to what extent a child we buy a Kinder for, will be happy with the surprise, because we do not know what the toy inside is. Given the intangibility of services, marketing them becomes a challenging risk. Kinder should market Kinder Surprise that way so consumers are ensured they get a better service from it then from its cheaper substitutes.

Related to intangibility, inseparability is a quality where production of the service cannot be separated from its consumption. In the case of Kinder Surprise, this quality cannot be performed.

Variability, or heterogeneity, implies quality of services provided by the personnel. A consumer calling to Kinder hotline, can be assisted by different staff. A person might be rude or answering in a way a consumer does not like. As a consequence, the image of Kinder Surprise will fall in the eyes of the consumer. Therefore, it is difficult to control service quality.

Another quality for evaluation is called perishability that happens when an unused service or good cannot be used for future occasions. To deal with the difficulty, a company should think on how to maintain supply and demand for the services. Kinder can keep its demands by introducing new packaging styles or making new sets of a certain product. For instance, Kinder introduced a package of 3 Kinders, or a limited edition of Kinder Surprise with aeroplanes. In other words, the company always thinks of possible ways to keep the consumers be interested in the product even after so many years.

There are five classifications of services where they can be analysed. These are: type of market, degree of labour intensiveness, degree of customer contact, skill of the service provider and goal of the service provider.

Degree of customer contact is important in service marketing as it makes a crucial influence on the customer. If the degree of customer contact is high, it should be of high quality because it will be judged by consumers. Kinder Surprise should train their employees for them to deliver high quality communication.

Degree of labour intensiveness. It is important that consumers know how The product purchased was produced, by which person. Maybe Kinder Suprirse could write the name of the person whose shift it was to use the technology of LASH – a cosmetic brand. This way consumers closely engage with those people who develop the product they buy.

But what keeps the consumers to be continuously interested in Kinder Surprise? What is special about it that even its rivals cannot offer? Nowadays it becomes more and more difficult to maintain customers on your side due to high competition. There are so many eggs introduced by other companies, mainly by local ones in almost each country. Still yet, consumers choose Kinder Surprise over other cheaper substitutions. In Russia for example, there are at least 2 companies which also produce eggs with a toy inside and which are sometimes twice as cheap as their rival Kinder. Also, because of the type of product the company delivers, there is little communication between a customer and the company itself which makes it difficult for a product to be competitive as you don’t know the preferences of consumers. Some other regulations may apply making it restrictive for a company to sell the product. For instance, the ban law in the United States, which doesn’t let Ferrero, put Kinder Surprise on market for many years already.