Chapter 7: Product
7.6 Discussion Questions and Activities
Review and Reflect
- What are the marketing implications for your company if buyers stop viewing your primary product as a shopping good and begin considering it a convenience good? How would you respond to the change?
- Can you market unsought goods? If so, how?
- How does packaging add value for consumers and retailers?
- If consumers find the most value in the services of your offering rather than the tangible product, how will perishability, intangibility, variability, and inseparability influence your marketing? Be specific for each characteristic.
- The text says that branding is much more than labelling or packaging. Provide some examples where you believe the product did not live up to the brand. Using examples to illustrate how consistency works, discuss how the offering and the desired brand image have to be consistent.
- Who owns an idea? If a customer comes up with an innovation involving your product, and your company thinks that innovation can be commercialized, who owns the new product?
- Assume you come up with an idea for a new electronic product you think your fellow students would really like. How would you go through the product development process? How would you accomplish each step within that process?
- Select a product you are familiar with and explain the stages of the product’s life cycle and different ways in which a company can extend its mature stage.
- Why, given the availability of good research practices, do so many new products fail?
- What has been Apple’s pricing strategy throughout their products’ life cycles? If you made iPhone copycat products, what would your price have to be to compete successfully?
- What are the risks associated with beta testing? What criteria would you use to select customers when needing a beta test?
- This textbook is an open-source text, meaning your professor can modify its contents. Further, using multiple delivery modes (online, print black and white, print colour) is a relatively new concept for textbooks. What type of screening process would you expect to have been used in developing the concept of open-source, multimode texts? How would that screening process differ from the screening process used to assess this specific book’s potential? Describe what you think those two processes would look like. If you don’t think the screening process would differ, why?
- You’ve got a really great idea for a new online business. But you need capital to get the business going, and when you ask investors for money they want to know if you’ve done a market test and what the results were. Why are they asking for market test results? What are the risks associated with a market test? Are there other ways you can answer their real concerns without doing a market test?
Activities
- Identify three television commercials designed to persuade buyers to view the products being advertised as shopping items rather than convenience items. What is similar about the strategies employed in the commercials? Do you think the commercials are successful? Why or why not?
- Identify a product for which packaging adds value and describe how that value is added for the consumer. Identify a second brand for which the organization uses primary packaging to distinguish the brand at the point of purchase and describe how the package contributes to the branding. Do not use brands used as examples in the chapter. Finally, identify a pure service brand and describe how that service is “packaged.”
- Select two brands that serve the same market but are not discussed in the chapter. Using print advertising, screen shots from websites, and stills from commercials (use screen shots from streaming video), assemble supporting material that helps you describe what each brand stands for and how consumers view each brand. Is one brand better than the other? Why or why not?
- Identify two new consumer products sold in a grocery store or by a mass merchandiser such as Walmart. Explain the strategies used to introduce each of the products and which strategy you feel will be most successful.
- Identify three products that are sold in international markets and explain any differences in how the products have been changed to meet the needs of consumers in the international markets.
