Products, Services, and Brands Flashcards
What is a Product?
Anything that can be offered to a
market for attention, acquisition, use,
or consumption that might satisfy a
want or need.
Products are a key element in the overall market offering. Marketing mix planning begins with building an offering that brings value to target customers.
What is a Service?
An activity, benefit, or satisfaction
offered for sale that is essentially
intangible and does not result in the
ownership of anything.
Three levels of Product
Each level adds more customer value.
The most basic level is the core customer value, which addresses the question: What is the buyer really buying? When designing products, marketers must first define the core, problem-solving benefits, services, or experiences that consumers seek.
IE: revlon doenst sell lipstick in stores, it sells hope.
Harley davidson sells freedom, independence…
At the second level, product planners must turn the core benefit into an actual product. Design, quality, brand name, packaging….
The name, styling, features, sounds, parts, and other attriutes have all been carefully combined to deliver the core customer values of freedom and independence.
Finally a product planner must build an augmented product around the core benefit and actual product by offering additional consumer services and benefits.
CORE CUSOMTER VALUE
Actual product [Brand name, Features, Quality level, Packaging, Design]
Augmented Product [Delivery and credit, After-sale service, Warranty, Product support]
Revlon lipsticks
Harleydavidson motors
Product and Service Classifications
Products and services fall into two broad classes based on the types of consumers who
use them: consumer products and industrial products. Broadly defined, products also
include other marketable entities such as experiences, organizations, persons, places,
and ideas.
Consumer products
Products and services bough by final consumers for personal consumption. Marketers usually classify these products and services further based on how consumers go about buying them. Consumer products include:
-Convenience products(toothpaste),
low prices, marketers place them readily available for customers(customers dont think much)
-Shopping products(Major appliances),
marketers distribute their products through fewer outlets but provide deeper sales support to help customers in their comparison efforts.
-Specialty products(Luxury goods),
-Unsought products(Life insurance/Red cross blood donations)
By their very nature, unsought products
require a lot of promoting, personal selling, and other marketing efforts.
Industrial Product?
Industrial products are those products purchased for further processing or for use in conducting a business. Thus, the distinction between a consumer product and an industrial product is based on the purpose for which the product is purchased. If a consumer buys a lawn mower for use around home, the lawn mower is a consumer product. If the same consumer buys the same
lawn mower for use in a landscaping business, the lawn mower is an industrial product.
Four service characteristics:
_Service Intangibility
Services cannot be seen, tasted, felt, heard, or smelled before purchase
IE: Airline passengers, cosmetic surgery,
_Service Variability
The quality of services may vary greatly depending on who provides them and when, where, and how they are provided.
[service varies ie: hotels and even receptionists in the hotel offer different levels of service ]
_Service Inseparability
Services are produced and consumed at the same time and cannot be separated from their providers.
[ie: if a service employee provides the service, then the employee becomes a part of the service; play active role in its delivery// Cant mail hair to get haircut, have to be there in person]
_Service perishability
Services cannot be stored for later sale or use.
[ie: doctors charge patients for missed appointments because the service value existed only at that point and disappeared when the patient did not show up]
What are the 3 types of Services Marketing?
Internal Marketing
External Marketing
Interactive Marketing
The four major brand strategy decisions?
1_ Brand positioning
2_ Brand name selection
3_ Brand sponsorship
4_ Brand development
In brand development what are the 4 choices to developing brands ?
It can introduce line extensions, brand extensions, multibrands, or new brands.
_Line extensions occur when a company extends existing brand names to new forms, colors, sizes, ingredients, or flavors of existing product category.
[low-cost, low-risk way to introduce new products]
_Brand extensions: extends a current brand name to a new or modified product in a new category.
_Multibrands: Companies often market many different brands in a given product category. Ie: PepsiCo. Multibrands offer a way to establish different features that appeal to different customer segments, lock up more reseller shelf space, and capture a larger market share.
_New brands: A company might believe that the power of its existing brand name is waning
so a new brand name is needed. Or it may create a new brand name when it enters a new
product category for which none of its current brand names is appropriate. For example,
Toyota created the separate Lexus brand aimed at luxury car consumers.
Brand positioning :
Marketers need to position their brands clearly in target customers’ minds.
They can position brands at any of three levels.
At the lowest level, they can position the brand on product attributes.(quality, features, style and innovative features…)
However attributes are the least desirable level for brand positioning, companies can easily copy attributes.
A brand can be better positioned by associating its name with a desirable BENEFIT.(talk about benefits such as taking the hassle out of cooking , or guaranteed on-time delivery)
The strongest brands go beyond attribute or benefit positioning.
They are positioned on strong beliefs and values, engaging customers on a deep, emotional level.
Advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi suggests
that brands should strive to become lovemarks, products or services that “inspire loyalty beyond reason.”
Brand name selection:
A good name can add greatly to a product’s success.
1_Suggest something about products benefits
2_easy to pronounce
3_distinctive
4_extendable
5_translate easily
6_capable of registration and legal protection
Desirable qualities for a brand name include the following: (1) It should suggest something
about the product’s benefits and qualities: Beautyrest, Slimfast, Facebook, Airbnb. (2)
It should be easy to pronounce, recognize, and remember: iPad, Tide, Jelly Belly, Twitter,
JetBlue. (3) The brand name should be distinctive: Panera, Swiffer, Zappos, Nest. (4) It
should be extendable—Amazon.com began as an online bookseller but chose a name that
would allow expansion into other categories. (5) The name should translate easily into foreign
languages: Coca-Cola translates in Chinese to “Ke Kou Ke Le,” which means “tasty
fun.” (6) It should be capable of registration and legal protection. A brand
name cannot be registered if it infringes on existing brand names.
Brand sponsorship
Brand Sponsorship
A manufacturer has four sponsorship options. The product may be launched as a national
brand (or manufacturer’s brand), Or the
manufacturer may sell to resellers who give the product a private brand (also called a
store brand).
Although most manufacturers create their own brand names, others market
licensed brands. Finally, two companies can join forces and co-brand a product. We discuss
each of these options in turn.
National brands versus store brands:
National brands have long dominated the retail scene. In recent years increasing number of retailers have created their own store brands(or private brands). Store brands have been gaining popularity for decades, however recent years have been a store-brand boom.
Value Proposition
With a more-for-the-same value proposition, companies can attack a competitor’s more-for-more positioning by introducing a brand offering comparable quality at a lower price.
Offering the same for less can be a powerful value proposition, as it is a good deal. Discount stores offer many of the same brands as department stores and specialty stores but at deep discounts based on superior purchasing power and lower-cost operations.
Less-for-much-less positioning involves meeting consumers’ lower performance or quality requirements at a much lower price. For example, many travelers seeking lodgings prefer not to pay for what they consider unnecessary extras, such as a pool, an attached restaurant, or mints on the pillow. Hotel chains such as Ramada Limited, Holiday Inn Express, and Motel 6 suspend some of these amenities and charge less accordingly. Less-for-much-less positioning involves meeting consumers’ lower performance or quality requirements at a much lower price. For example, Costco warehouse stores offer less merchandise selection and consistency and much lower levels of service; as a result, they charge rock-bottom prices. Similarly, at ALDI grocery stores, customers pay super-low prices but must settle for less in terms of the service extras. “You can’t eat frills,” says ALDI, “so why pay for them?” (See Marketing at Work)
The winning value proposition would be to offer more for less. Companies find it very difficult to sustain such best-of-both positioning. Offering more usually costs more, making it difficult to deliver on the “for-less” promise. Companies that try to deliver both may lose out to more focused competitors. For example, when it first opened for business, Home Depot had arguably the best product selection, the best service, and the lowest prices compared with local hardware stores and other home-improvement chains
All said, each brand must adopt a positioning strategy designed to serve the needs and
wants of its target markets. More for more will draw one target market, less for much less
will draw another, and so on. In any market, there is usually room for many different companies,
each successfully occupying different positions. The important thing is that each
company must develop its own winning positioning strategy, one that makes the company
special to its target consumers.
