Marketing Chapter 8 Quiz: Products and Brands

Chapter 8: Products, Services, and Brands: Building Customer Value

• Learning Objectives:
  • Define product and describe major product/service classifications.
  • Describe company decisions regarding individual products, product lines, and product mixes.
  • Explore four characteristics affecting service marketing, along with additional considerations.
  • Discuss branding strategy (decisions in building & managing brands).

What is a Product?

• Anything offered in a market for attention, acquisition, use, or consumption to satisfy needs or wants.
• Includes tangible goods, services (activities, benefits, or satisfactions not resulting in ownership), and experiences.

Types of Products

• Consumer products:

  • Convenience: Frequently purchased, little planning (e.g., toothpaste).
  • Shopping: Less frequent purchase; careful comparison (e.g., furniture).
  • Specialty: Unique characteristics or brand identification; special effort to purchase (e.g., designer clothes).
  • Unsought: Consumer doesn't know about or knows but doesn't normally consider (e.g., life insurance).

• Industrial products:

  • Purchased for further processing or use in conducting a business (e.g., materials, capital items, supplies).

• Other classifications: Organizations, persons, places, and ideas. (e.g., organization marketing, person marketing, place marketing, social marketing).

Individual Product Decisions

• Product attributes: Quality, features, style & design.
• Product quality: Total quality management, return-on-quality, quality level, performance quality, and conformance quality (meeting expectations).
• Features: Competitive tools for differentiation.
• Style: Appearance of the product.
• Design: Product's usefulness and looks.
• Brand: Name, term, sign or design; identifies maker/seller.
• Packaging: Designing the product's container/wrapper.
• Labels: Identify product/brand, describe attributes, and promote.
• Product support services: Services that augment actual products

Product Line Decisions

• Product line: Group of closely related products, all sold to the same customer groups, marketed through the same channels, and fall within similar price ranges.
• Product line length: Number of items in the product line.
• Line stretching: Adding products to an existing product line.
• Line filling: Adding more items within the existing range.

Product Mix Decisions

• Product mix: All product lines and items offered for sale by a particular seller.
• Product mix width: Number of different product lines.
• Product mix length: Total number of items.
• Product mix depth: Number of versions offered for each product.
• Product mix consistency: How closely related the various product lines are in end use, production requirements, distribution channels, or target markets.

Services Marketing

• Four characteristics:

  • Intangibility: Cannot be seen, tasted, felt, heard, or smelled before purchase.
  • Variability: Quality depends on who provides it and when/where/how.
  • Inseparability: Services cannot be separated from their providers.
  • Perishability: Cannot be stored for later sale or use.

• Additional considerations:

  • Service-profit chain: Links service firm profits with employee & customer satisfaction.
  • Internal marketing: Orients and motivates customer-contact employees & supporting service personnel to work as a team for customer satisfaction.
  • Interactive marketing: Service quality depends on the buyer-seller interaction quality.
  • Strategies for managing service quality & productivity; include hiring, training, managing encounter quality and quantity.

Brand Strategy

• Brand equity: Differential effect of knowing the brand name on customer response to the product or marketing.
• Brand value: Total financial value of a brand.
• Brand positioning: Positioning brands at several levels (attributes, benefits, beliefs & values)
• Brand name selection: Suggests benefits & qualities; easy to pronounce, recognize, and remember; distinctive; translatable; capable of registration and legal protection.
• Brand sponsorship: Manufacturer's brand, private brand, licensed brand, and co-brand.
• Brand development strategies: Line extensions, brand extensions, multibrands, and new brands.