Video Transcript: Product Marketing Mix - Part 1

Hi there, and welcome back to this next module of our marketing course here at  CLI. And this particular module here is about the marketing mix, specifically the  product marketing mix. And I hope that you bear with me. There's a lot of fairly  deep information in this particular module, and I think you'll probably be as  excited as I am to know that this is one of the last fundamental marketing  modules that we'll be talking about from here on out. We start getting into some  of the fun stuff of how or what type of marketing strategies you can use to  actually promote your business or promote your ministry. So in this particular  module, we'll be talking about one of the four elements of the marketing mix,  and that is product management. Few learning objectives that we have for this  particular module. This first lecture is, what is this all about? What is the product  marketing mix, the overall scope? What is it all involved? The second lecture,  we start talking about, we continue talking about the overall scope. We talked  about a pretty cool marketing discipline called Product Management. I enjoy it.  There's a lot to the product management part of marketing. We'll talk about  some of the factors that influence change in the product mix, and then we'll talk  about specific strategies that are used to promote a product or promote a  service throughout its life cycle. And the life cycle is another topic that we'll be  talking about in this particular series of three lectures. We talked about new  product introductions, new service introductions, how we handle that, how we go about doing that. And then we wrap it all up with a short discussion on product  life cycles and strategies that are used throughout those life cycle components.  What is a product? A product is anything that can be offered to the market, for  attention, for acquisition, for use, consumption, that might satisfy a want or a  need. There are different types and classes of products, and we're going to talk  about some of this stuff, different types and different classes of products and  services, and we're going to explore these next so that you get a high degree of  familiarity with them. A lot of these things, you probably have already heard  about, these terms banded around, but you maybe never really figured out what  it was all about. There's two types of products, tangible, intangible. I mean, that's kind of self obvious. You got tangible, tangible products. You must have  intangible products. The tangible stuff are goods, stuff that you can pick up, that  you can hold, things like refrigerators, tables, furniture, whatever intangible  products are, the services such as a plumber or an electrician or somebody  that's selling insurance or something of that nature, those would be classified as  an intangible product. So two types of products, tangible, intangible. There's  different levels of product within a product category, for example, maybe one of  the best things I can think of is the different kinds of vacations that you can do.  You can go anywhere from getting a tent, throwing a tent in the back of your car  and driving to a campground and camping somewhere to buying yourself a very  expensive cruise. And this is what we're talking about here, basic products,  basic features, expected features, luxury features and unexpected features, and

this is all reflected in the value of the product that you're getting. So example,  you're going to pay a lot more for a luxury cruise than you are one of these Mass Production Type cruises that you get on the Caribbean where you got 5000  other people on the boat with you, and you're going to pay more for that kind of  a vacation than you are renting an RV and driving around the United States for  two weeks, and you're going to pay more for that than you would by going to a  campground with your tent. So that's what we're talking about here. With levels  of product. You're talking about the perceived value increases or decreases, and also the pricing, the benefits, that sort of thing, three primary classes of  products. And again, this is something that you'll see in the news media, very  often, durable products, consumer products, business products, durable  products are again, things like refrigerators, like cars, furniture, maybe even  apparel. Apparel, I guess, would probably come through more in consumer  products, things like shirts or underwear or whatever you know, that kind of stuff  would be fall in the class of a consumer product, business products. You're  looking at all the raw materials that are needed to build or create the product  that you're selling or to perform the services that you're selling. So in other  words, if you're a plumber, you're going to some wholesale shop to buy all of the pipe and all the valves and all the different components that they might need to  do an installation on a new home construction project that they might be working with, or you could be working for some sort of an aerospace firm who that builds jet engines or builds different components for airplanes or satellites or whatever,  and they will need different assemblies. They'll need different circuit boards,  electronics and all that kind of stuff. Those are falling into the realm of business  products. So durable, non durable products, cars. Non durable is groceries,  services, again, is the plumber, electricians. So let's talk a little bit about the  consumer products that gets divided down into two sub categories. We're talking about things like convenience products and shopping products. So shopping,  you get into the the apparel type stuff, the clothing and different things that you  might need around the house, or, you know, just those sorts of things. They tend to have a little more staying power. They last a little longer. Whereas  convenience products are anything that you would find at a convenience store,  you know, like a 711 or the corner gas station that has a large retail area inside  selling pop or soda or snacks or groceries or any of that kind of stuff would fall  into the area of A convenience product, which typically does not last long.  Convenience goods, consumers use minimal effort, or they invest actually  minimal effort for frequently purchased, low cost items. And again, we're talking  about things such as groceries, basic needs. And again, you can make the  argument that perhaps somebody spends a lot of time clipping coupons, that  kind of a thing, but that's more of an almost more of an exception to the rule  than it is a fact, emergency goods, home repair items are convenience goods,  impulse purchases. You go through the checkout line at the grocery store, and 

there's a reason they have all these racks of stuff sitting right alongside of you  as you're kind of waiting next in line to check out key characteristics of shopping  products. So we had the convenience products. Now we're going to talk about  the shopping products. Consumers typically will spend quite a bit of effort to  evaluate these particular things. And a great example of this stuff is going to be  anything that you would find on Amazon. One of the reasons Amazon exists is  so that you can quickly compare hundreds of similar items to the one that you  might be interested in. You can do these product comparisons. You can do price  comparisons. They can get all kinds of information that will help you to make  your purchase. And consumers will spend a lot of time going through this  process to figure out where they want to spend their $50 or their $100 on new  bread maker, or whatever it is that they're that they're shopping for, and these  typically are the opposite of convenience products, in that these are not  impulsive purchase decisions that are being made here. They will sometimes,  depending on pricing or delivery, if delivery is delayed, they might switch over to  another product that they can get in the next two days, or they might be able to  get free shipping on another product. That is a reasonable trade off for them.  Products on this particular area, like I've said before, tend to last a considerable  length of time, maybe not forever, but they'll certainly last for a month, six  months a year, kind of a thing, monetary, social costs on this could be high types of business products. So we're going from consumer type products to the  business type products. And again, what falls into this area are the raw  materials, the parts, components. We're talking about manufactured assemblies, parts, capital items such as machinery and equipment and the installation for  that stuff, and even business services such as professional services like  accounting or legal services, that kind of thing, maintenance and repair and  freelance contractors and subcontractors are especially becoming much more  popular. So that's a basic understanding right off the right out of the gate here  about some fundamental product marketing management concepts. In the next  module that we're going to do, we're going to spend some time exploring a lot of the more intricate details of product management.