Teepack (www.teepack.com) is a specialized manufacturer of tea bag machines for the world's bestknown brands of tea and herbs and fruit teas, such as Lipton, Pickwick, Twinings and Lyons/Tetley

Teepack is a sister company of Teekanne, the leading tea, herb, and fruit tea packing company in Germany, with the Teefix, Pompadour and Teekanne brands. (The Teekanne Group has production and sales subsidiaries in several countries. There are about 1,300 employees in the Group).

The invention of the automatic tea bag-packaging machine by Teepack in 1949 revolutionized the tea market with the double-chamber tea bag. It meant that production volumes could be increased dramatically. Today the latest generation of these machines is capable of production speeds of almost 400 tea bags per minute, i.e. some 4 billion per year.
The tea bag produced on Teepack machines is the most sold double-chamber tea bag in the world. Important benefits are that it has considerably larger space between the two bag chambers and offers maximum tea bag stability and durability without adding glue or heat sealing.

The popularity of this practical tea bag has continued to grow, for example, in Germany 82 per cent of tea sales are in double-chamber tea bags; in the United States the figure is about 90 per cent and in Europe, if you omit the United Kingdom, the figure is close to 100 per cent. Even in the former UK colony, Australia, the double-chamber tea bag has almost convinced the consumers. ‘Down under', sales of UK tea bags and the double-chamber tea bag more or less balance themselves out

For over 50 years Teepack GmbH has been the number one producer of double-chamber tea bag packaging machines in the world and has sold more than 2,000 of its packaging machine ‘Constanta'. Thanks to Teepack's packaging machines Lipton is the market leader of the international tea market. Up to 1957 Teepack had sold more than 100 tea bag packaging machines in the United States Technical innovation resulted in Teepack engineers developing a new, even more efficient machine - ‘Perfecta'. Since 1990 more than 200 ‘Perfecta' machines have been sold worldwide. Today Teepack has a market share of about 70 per cent of the global double chamber tea bag machine market.

Questions

1. How would you forecast worldwide demand for tea bag machines?

2. Argue the case for the market analysis method you would choose if you had to evaluate the competitiveness of Teepack Spezialmaschinen on the global tea bag packaging machine market.

3. In order to achieve better customer feedback, the top management of Teepack is interested in learning how to measure customer satisfaction. Propose a questionnaire design that contains some of the themes which it would be relevant to include in the questionnaire.

4. How would you organise the internal database with the customers' responses and the feedback of the questionnaire results to the customers?