Introduction

Baskin Robbins is known as the world’s largest chain of ice cream stores. The founders, Burt Baskin and Irv Robbins, came up with the concept of having one flavor for each day of the month in their ice cream parlor. Through their innovation and creativity, they led the ice cream industry successfully. Baskin Robbins is better known for its generous variety of flavors as it offers over 1,000 flavors of ice cream, including Sugar Free, Fat Free and Light choices. Its comprehensive menu also includes frozen yogurt, sorbets, sherbets, beverages, ice cream cakes and sundaes.

Reason of choosing Baskin Robbins

• Well known at ice cream brand in the world
• Located all around Malaysia, hence it is easily to do survey
• Extreme hot weather in Malaysia
• Have many promotion periods

Market Competition

Baskin Robbins Company is categorized as monopolistic competition that it is a market structure in which a large number of sellers that sell close substitute products. In the ice cream industry, the goods produced and sold are different but close to their substitute products. For example, the greatest competition between Baskin Robbins is Haagen Dazs.

One of the characteristics is there are larger number of sellers. The size of the firm is small, thus it cannot influence the market price. Hence, Baskin Robbins follows an independent price-output policy. Besides that, Baskin Robbins Company will produce differentiated products by using various methods to differentiate their products to create a preference among buyers or consumers through designing, labeling, advertising, branding and packaging (Vengedasalam, 2009). Moreover, entry into and exit out of the monopolistic ice cream competitive industry are unrestricted. New firms can enter the industry with close substitutes to the existing brand but entry into and exit out of a monopolistic competition is not that easy because of the product differentiation.

In addition, monopolistic competition is competing based on the products and is not for the price of the product. As for Baskin Robbins, many consumers may purchase and choose this brand because they create a sense of brand awareness among customers. Lastly, the price elasticity of Baskin Robbins products’ demand is relatively large. The income level of consumer will affect the sales on Baskin Robbins ice cream products.

Problem Statement

• What are the main factors that influencing the demand for Baskin Robbins?
• What are the reasons for buyers to purchase ice cream during promotion period?
• As the consumers’ income increases, will buyers consume more ice cream?
• If the price of other ice cream brand is lower than Baskin Robbins ice cream, will buyers continue to buy it?

Objectives

• To determine the factors of demand for Baskin Robbins ice cream
• To determine the price elasticity of Baskin Robbins ice cream.

Limitation

One of the limitations in conducting the survey is that respondents always reject us because they are in a rush and busy. For some, they might not be interested as they do not get benefit from filing in the survey forms. Besides that, in the process of collecting back the survey, we realized that the respondents are not that cooperative in filling up the survey questions as they might leave them blank or write in handwriting that is difficult to read. Moreover, as the respondents are unwilling to answer the survey questions, their answers might not be that genuine and sincere as they just simply ticking the answers as an easygoing manner.