How The Chefs Toolbox use marketing

The Chefs Toolbox offer top quality cookware through home cooking workshops and their online store. We talked to founder David Mills about his marketing strategy:

1. What's been your most successful marketing activity to date?
We have only just started any form of external marketing. Prior to Wordstorm we focussed our marketing budget on our existing customers to encourage repeat sales.

Our most successful campaign has just occurred. Traditionally January is our slowest month so during Nov and Dec we gave a substantial incentive to customers to host a Cooking Workshop in Jan. The result is Jan was our busiest month ever, and has set us up with fantastic momentum for Feb and Mar.

2. How do you differentiate your marketing for the retail side and the business (party plan) side?
Our consultants all love our products so the message is often similar - we make cooking fun through both our products and the techniques we teach. For retail customers, the message stops at that point. For our consultants, the message continues beyond the fun of cooking to their broader lifestyle due to their income, incentive trips, the flexibility of their working hours etc.

3. Do you use any marketing research tools/websites?
In general we use our real-world customer data, supplemented with focus groups and anecdotal feedback. We have run a few on-line surveys and competitions to systemise the feedback.

4. Have you ever used YouTube or My Space? Has it been successful for you?
I don't understand MySpace. We have created quite a few cooking videos and marketing videos for our own website so we have posted these on YouTube. To date, the videos haven't changed our economics, but who knows where they may lead. Our customers love to hear that we're a hip Gen-Y company.

5. Why did you choose PR to incorporate in your marketing mix?
PR has proven an effective part of our marketing strategy due to the amount of media coverage we received, resulting in more customers coming to us and a higher return on investment.

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