Conpany Case - Build-A-Bear Case Analysis

Build-A-Bear Case Analysis

Build-A-Bear offers an extraordinary experience to children customers by “Building- A-Memory” in terms of the marketing concept. By differentiating between needs, wants and demands, it is evident that the company fully understands the vital importance and the recursive hierarchy of the appealing concepts. Its practice reveals the proper deficiency of the basic physiological needs for food, clothing, warmth and security, the social needs for belonging, affection，knowledge  and self-expression.

Joining the Build-A-Bear “club”, it is appealing to children customers who find themselves in the fairyland, reflecting their need for the sense of belonging, who foster caring affection by enjoying at their will the procedure of “Hear me”, “Stitch me”, “Dress me”, and “Name me”, through which friendship has been established, knowledge acquired, pleasure gained, and who identify opportunities to express their individual personality by working on a bear product based on their individualized imagination.

Wants，a form of human needs, are affected by culture and individuality. Clark’s effective communication with children and even their parents, in this respect, gives rise to the development of individual products and services, including the site selection, accessories design and the changing product design, to satisfy the children’s fickle tastes.

Demands arises from wants when purchasing power occurs. In this case, Build-A-Bear’s stable growth and its swift rise of the stock explains its good satisfaction with the needs of the customers who could afford the service products developed over the enhanced customer communication, the market positioning and the potential buying power.

As for the recursive hierarchy of needs, wants, and demands, Build-A-Bear, in making and developing its products, has initially identified the core customer needs, followed by every element of the product offering created with the intention of fulfilling one of these needs, thus generating wants and desires within the customers. Clark’s careful consideration, through her close observation, about what the specifics of what customers are demanding and what is being offered and not offered embodies customer value and well satisfies the individual needs of the children.

Build-A-Bear’s “product” is multi-faceted, including the specifics of the tangible item, the ability to customize and personalize each part of the product, the part of the creative process and coming away with an item, the store ambience and even waiting in line as part of the experience.  

Build-A-Bear focuses on a complete list of benefits (which can be described as actual product like various toys, the names of the toys, voice boxes and accessories; core experience perceived from the customized products, the initiative processes, and the store ambiences; and augmented product like the value for the customers offered by the company’s individualized efforts) as well as customer costs (value being of function of benefits minus costs) in its transaction (exchange). The benefits identified in the case should be the customer value to build and retain customer loyalty. The value for the customer (children) is the need /want fulfillment. Build-A-Bear offers the children a fun price ration, a thorough building process, and various efforts made for the enhanced experience which can also be identified as customer value, but compared with Teddy Bear, who captures higher price for its quality product, Build-A-Bear needs to improve its product and makes clearer that the customized and individualized efforts and time consumed are identified as part of the benefits for Teddy consumers who might be ignorant of weighing the value in such an aspect.