There are four categories of products: convenience, shopping, specialty, and unsought. Unsought goods are the ones which were not previously known to consumers, such as new models of phone. Conveniences are the products sold at various places and people often buy them without any particular thought. Specialties are usually prominent, much more expensive purchases, which require much effort in order to get them. Shopping is something in between conveniences and specialties.
Services are considered as a consumer product that has four characteristics. These are intangibility, services cannot be seen, tasted or heard, inseparability, cannot be separated from providers, variability, quality of service depends on providers, and perishability, which means services cannot be stored for later use (Marketing Management). Another important thing is the product life cycle, which means evaluating a product category throughout its lifetime.
Home entertainment was chosen as the example of a product category. The charts provided showed its introductions, growth, maturity, and decline through the timeline from the first VHS’s appearance to the current streaming services. The diffusion of innovation is a principle that has different groupings, which are formed according to how consumers like to make purchases based on various factors such as how quickly the product comes out or how fast they make a purchase. The introduction of new phones is used to illustrate the diffusion of innovation.
The FAB (Feature, Attributes, and Benefits) principle allows for structure when presenting product features and what they accomplish. To better understand this notion, the example of an air conditioning system was shown. Benefits, as part of FAB, are often used within service industries, and as an example of it, the Safelite’s app is shown. For example, the feature of billing information attributes to inform customers how much is owed. The system of offering a credit card at a bank is used with the FAB principle appliance, where it is necessary to think about the target market, its features to better attribute to it and bring benefits to the targeted market.
Packaging, which consists of color, name, message, specific verbiage, and used materials, is also a significant part of marketing a product. For example, thoughtful packaging, as specific words or colors of luxury, will help sell a product faster and more profitably. The flow of the audience’s eyes and the organization of information on the packaging make a tremendous difference in the success of getting the information towards the consumer.
Reference
(2020). Marketing Management. Franklin University.