Products

Goods, Services, Ideas

Goods and Services may overlap with hybrids

Products exist on several levels

Augmented Product: Standards, installation, integration, services, etc.
Actual Product: Brand, style, features, quality, etc.
Core Product: Benefits

Products can be:

Consumer products:
- Convenience products: Items consumers purchase frequently, immediately, and with little effort
- Shopping products: Typically purchased after buyer has compared competing products in competing stores
- Specialty Products: Items a purchaser is willing to make a special effort to obtain
- Unsought Products: Goods and services that consumers either do not know about or know about but don’t think of buying until a need arises
- Review differences chart
Business products:
- Components: Items that become part of a final product
- Support: Items used to assist in producing other products and services
Business and consumer products

Product Item: Specific product that has a unique brand, size, or price
- Product Line: Group of related products marked by physical similarities or intended for a similar market
- Product Mix
  - Width: Number of product lines a company carries
  - Length: Total number of items the company carries within its product lines
  - Depth: Number of versions of each product in the line
  - Consistency: How closely the various product lines are in end use, production, and distribution
New Products
- Legal Newness: The FTC allows the word new to be used for 6 months after the product enters regular distribution
- Organizational Newness:
  - Product Line Extension: Incremental improvement to an existing product
  - Brand Extension: Existing brand name in an unfamiliar market
  - Radical Innovation: Revolutionary new product
- Comparative newness: Making modifications to an existing product
  - Feature bloat: Extra features that add no consumer value but increase cost of product
  - Feature fatigue: Bloat denigrates the user experience and results in dissatisfaction
- Consumer Perspective of newness: Degree of learning required by the customer
  - Continuous innovation: No learning is needed
  - Dynamically continuous innovation: Minor changes in behavior are needed
  - Discontinuous innovation: Learn entirely new consumption patterns for the use of the product to explain benefits and proper use
- 80% of new consumer products fail because
  - No point of difference
  - New development process
  - Bad timing
  - Distribution
  - Poor Marketing Mix
  - Unattractive market
  - Poor product quality
  - No need
- Stage-gate product development process
  - New product development passes through a series of gates before commercialization approval.
  - Lose early rather than late
Gaining consumer acceptance
- Successful products diffuse or spread through a population over time
- Diffusion is how innovation is communicated through certain channels over time among members of a society
- Product adopters
  - Innovators: Venturesome, higher education, multiple info sources
    - Introduction of product
    - Create product awareness and trial
  - Early Adopters: Leaders in social setting
    - Growth of product
    - Competitors begin to enter the market
    - Differentiation
  - Early Majority: Deliberate, many informal social contacts
    - Maturity of product
    - Competition is high
    - Maintain brand loyalty
  - Late Majority: Skeptical, below average social status
  - Laggards: Fear of debt, info sources are word of mouth
    - Decline of product
      - We can choose to allow the decline (harvest/drop product)
      - We can choose to renew the product (New innovation, re-targeting, re-positioning)
- Barriers to acceptance
  - Usage (compatibility with existing habits)
  - Value (Product offers incentive to change)
  - Risk
  - Psychological (Changes in image)
There is no typical life cycle for a product
- Nature of the product category affects the duration