LEARNING OBJECTIVES

After reading this chapter, students should:

❑ Know what are the characteristics of products and how do marketers classify products.

❑ Know how companies can differentiate products

❑ Know how a company can build and manage its product mix and product lines

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

❑ Know how companies can use packaging, labeling, warranties, and guarantees as marketing tools

CHAPTER SUMMARY

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 labeling.

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), or 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,