THE FOOD COURT

Chi-Chung Chien was about to begin an exciting new phase of life. Chi-Hung grew up in Taiwan, but came to the United States to get his education. During his college years, Chi-Chung fell in love with a local girl, married her, and applied for a permanent visa. Even though this meant leaving his family behind, Chi-Hung believed he could get home often enough to see Family and friends while building a new life in America.

For the past seven years, Chi-Hung worked at a local Chinese restaurant. He studied the moves carefully while trying to apply the many things he had learned in college from his marketing major and management minor. Finally, an opportunity presented itself. The mall in town had an opening for a new restaurant in its food court. The Chien family took out its life savings, in order to open the new KA-POW restaurant.

Chi-Chung spent great deal of time in the mall prior to making his decision to open his business. Having studied the five steps of the buying decision-making process in college, he was interested to see how they might apply in the mall. After all, there was a considerable amount of traffic through the food court. People stopped to buy soft drinks, snacks, and full meals. Some people ate with families. Junior high and young high schoolers would 'hang out" for hours. Shoppers stopped for a quick bite to eat. Even old-timers visited the food court as part of their morning "mall walking" ritual. Most wanted coffee, but the opportunity existed to sell tea to some of these patrons.

The most interesting part of the mall food-buying experience was to watch as an individual entered the food court. Some clearly had their minds made up and traveled directly to the restaurant of their choosing, whether it was McDonald's, Dairy Queen, Sbarros, or Chick-Fil-A, these national chains had steady inflows of traffic.

At the same time, Chi-Hung called numerous clients "wanderers." These shoppers would walk back forth between shops, trying to decide what kind of food to buy. Several of the stores offered free small food samples to entice the customer to develop a stronger craving for a certain kind of food and make a purchase as a result.

The key seemed to be discovering how various consumer groups made food-buying decisions. Chi-Hung was convinced he could deliver a quality product at a competitive price, with solid service.

Question: Describe your buying decision-making process the last time you ate at a mall food court.