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Product Decisions

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Submitted By karantripathi94
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Product Decisions

Decisions about the product types
The decisions about the product types to be offered represent the most critical decisions in determining the future of a company. The management must first decide what products to offer in the market place before other intelligent product decisions pertaining to the product’s physical attributes, packaging branding, and so on, can be made.

There are two distinct levels at which such changes take place, namely:
the product-mix level and
the product-line level.

Product-mix as ‘the composite of products offered for sale by a firm or business unit’.
Product-line as ‘a group of products that are closely related either because they satisfy a class of need, are used together, are sold to the same customer groups, are marketed through the same type of outlet or fall within given price range’.

Decisions at the product-mix level represent the highest order decisions made by the company constraining all the subsequent lower order decisions and identifying the business that the company operates.

A company’s product mix refers to the total number of products that are offered for sale. The product mix has certain width, length, depth and consistency (Kotler, 2003).

The width of a product mix refers to the total number of different product lines of the company. For example, width 2 (pasta and pasta sauces).
The length of a product mix refers to the total number of brands in all of the company’s product lines. For example, length 5 (three pasta brands and two brands of pasta sauce).
The depth of a product mix refers to the average number of variants of the company’s products. For example, depth 4 (three pasta brands, each marketed in two sizes: 3 2 6 and 2 pasta sauce brands, each marketed in 1 size: 2 1 2 means 6 2 8/2 4).
The consistency of a product mix refers

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