Product: end result of the production process sold on the market to satisfy a customer need.
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Consumer durables: manufactured products that can be reused and are expected to have a reasonably long life, such as cars.
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Product life cycle: pattern of sales recorded by a product from launch to withdrawal from the market.
Stages:
Introduction is when the product has just been launched after development and testing. Sales are often quite low to begin with and may increase only quite slowly but there are exceptions, such as a newly launched DVD by a major rock star.
Growth: if the product is effectively promoted and well received by the market, then sales should grow significantly. This stage cannot last forever, although all firms wish that it would. Eventually, and this may take days, weeks or even years, sales growth will begin to slow and might stop altogether, which leads the product into the next stage. The reasons for declining growth include increasing competition, technological changes making the product less appealing, changes in consumer tastes and saturation of the market.
Maturity or saturation: sales fail to grow, but they do not decline significantly either. This stage can last for years, for example Coca-Cola. The saturation of consumer durables markets is caused by most consumers who want a certain product having already bought one.
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Extension strategies: marketing plans that extend the maturity stage of the product before a brand new one is needed.
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Boston Consulting Group (BCG) matrix: method of analyzing the product portfolio of a business in terms of market share and market growth.
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Brand: identifying symbol, name, image or trademark that distinguishes a product from its competitors.
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Brand awareness: extent to a which a brand is recognized by potential customers and is correctly associated with a particular product can be expressed as a percentage of the target market.
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Brand loyalty: faithfulness of consumers to a particular brand as shown by their repeat purchases irrespective of the marketing pressure from competing brands.
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Brand development measures the infiltration of a product’s sales, usually per thousand population; if 100 people in 1000 buy a product, it has a brand development of 10.
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Brand value (or brand equity): premium that a brand has because customers are willing to pay more for it than they would for a non-branded generic product.
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