Ding-Dominos Case

To be successful in any business or industry, it requires a combination of knowledge and understanding of whom the customer base is and how to do it better than the competition. Hostess had been in tune with its customers for over eighty-two years while curbing appetites and serving up an array of sweet treats as rich as the company history until late 2012, when the company announced it would seek bankruptcy protection. This decision would directly affect eighteen thousand jobs and would leave millions of Americans scrounging for a sugar fix without the famed Twinkie and Ding-Dongs available on the shelves. There were several major issues that sent Hostess on a crash course for failure, such as lack of management and problem solving on the executive level, as well as union labor disputes. Leadership is vital in athletics, on a hospital floor, and the same goes for business. The leadership at Hostess failed to recognize the healthier social trends of the growing population. Harry Blazer, marketing researcher and food analyst says, “Hostess' snacks don't neatly fit into the U.S.
Hostess failed to recognize the taste buds of the consumer and the aging population that had been grabbing the Twinkies for decades; not to mention the health conscious generation or the rapid epidemic of diabetes in the United States. Hostess was in business because of their famous sweet cake product line that had been successful for many years, but once our government put labels on our food that reveals the calories and ingredients of the products, they should have realized that the public would be changing. Failing to recognize a product life-cycle and other bad signals eventually led to the larger issues with the unions. The company was too far gone by that point because of the product itself could not be