EDIT: I would like to introduce Ajay Arora. He is a marketing consultant with experience of over a decade behind him. He has successfully set up and run various marketing campaigns. Ajay will be contributing ideas and advice in the field of marketing.
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Perhaps the best know product and brand name in the world is ‘Coca-Cola’, also know as ‘Coke’. “If you don’t know what it is, Welcome to Planet Earth” - this was one of Coke’s add campaigns in the 90s. Only Coke would dare to launch a marketing campaign of this nature because everything about it like the bottle shape, the colours, packaging design and the logo are instantly recognisable, distinctive and familiar to almost everyone in the world.
What is a Product?
The product forms the core of marketing. Customers buy products to solve problems or to enhance their lives. Therefore the seller has to ensure that the product can fully satisfy the customer, not just in functional terms, but also in psychological terms. The product is extremely important because it is the final test of whether the seller has understood its customer’s needs.
By definition, “a product is a physical good, service, idea, person or place that is capable of offering tangible and intangible attributes that individuals or organisations regard as so necessary, worthwhile or satisfying that they are prepared to exchange money, patronage or some other unit of value in order to acquire it.”
The definition includes tangible products (e.g. phone, car, computer, pen etc.) and intangible products (e.g. services of say a doctor, business consultant, plumber etc.).
Whatever the product is, whether tangible or intangible, it can always be broken down into bundles of benefits that mean different things to different buyers. The figure below shows the basic anatomy of a product as a series of four circles representing the core product, the tangible product, the augmented product and finally the potential product.
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