Chapter 7: Products, Services and Branding Strategy

What is a product?
Anything that can be offered to a market for attention, acquisition, use, or consumption and that might satisfy a want or need. - Includes: physical objects, services, events, persons, places, organizations, ideas, or some combination thereof.

What is a service?
Any activity or benefit that one party can offer to another that is essentially intangible and does not result in the ownership of anything can referred as a Service.
Eg: banking industry, tourism industry, Information Technology services etc.

Levels of a Product ▪ Core benefit – What the consumer is really buying. ▪ Actual product – Includes the brand name, features, design, packaging, quality level. ▪ Augmented product – Additional services and benefits such as delivery and credit, instructions, installation, warranty, service.
Core benefit:-
Each level adds more customer value. The most basic level is the CORE BENEFIT which answers the question “What is the buyer really buying?” When designing the products, marketers must first define the core, problem solving benefits or services that consumers seek.
People buying a SONY Handycam are buying more than a digital camcorder. They are buying a convenient, high quality way to capture important moments and memories.

Actual product:-
At this second level, product planners must turn the core benefit into actual product. They need to develop product and service features, design a quality level, a brand name, and packaging. For example, the SONY camcorder is an actual product. Its name, parts, style, color, features, packaging and other attributes have all been combined carefully to deliver the core benefit of capturing memories.

Augmented product:-
Finally all product manufactures must build an augmented product around