Business Marketing

MKX 9550 – Tutorial

Creating value Product

Week 8

Objectives

• Know what the characteristics of products are and how marketers classify them

• Know how companies differentiate products

• Know how a company builds and manages its product mix and product lines

• Know how companies combine products to create strong co-brands or ingredient brands

• Know how companies use packaging, labelling, warranties and guarantees as marketing tools

Tutorial discussion (written submission is not required)

Product is the first and most important element of the marketing mix. Product strategy calls for making coordinated decisions on product mixes, product lines, brands and packaging and labelling.

In planning its market offering, the marketer needs to think through the five levels of the product: the core benefit, the basic product, the expected product, the augmented product and the potential product, which encompasses all the augmentations and transformations the product might ultimately undergo.

Products can be classified in several ways. In terms of durability and reliability, products can be nondurable goods, durable goods or services. In the consumer-goods category, products are convenience goods (staples, impulse goods, emergency goods), shopping goods (homogeneous and heterogeneous), specialty goods or unsought goods. In the industrial-goods category, products fall into one of three categories: materials and parts (raw materials and manufactured materials and parts), capital items (installations and equipment) and supplies and business services (operating supplies, maintenance and repair items, maintenance and repair services and business advisory services).

Brands can be differentiated on the basis of a number of different product or service dimensions: product form, features, performance, conformance, durability, reliability, repairability, style and design, as well as such service dimensions as ordering ease, delivery, installation, customer training,...