Products and Services

People satisfy their needs and wants with products. A product is anything that
can he offered to a market to satisfy a need or want. Usually, the word product
suggests a physical object, such as a car, a television set or a bar of soap. However,
the concept of product is not limited to physical objects - anything capable of
satisfying a need can be called a product. In addition to tangible goods, products
include services, which are activities or benefits offered for sale that are essentially
intangible and do not result in the ownership of anything. Examples are
banking, airline, hotel and household appliance repair services. Broadly defined,
products also include other entities such as persons, places, organizations,
activities and ideas. Consumers decide which entertainers to watch on television,
which political party to vote for, which places to visit on holiday, which organizations
to support through contributions and which ideas to adopt. Thus the term
product covers physical goods, services and a variety of other vehicles that can
satisfy consumers' needs and wants. If at times the term product does not seem to
fit, we could substitute other terms such as satisfier, resource or offer.
Many sellers make the mistake of paying more attention to the physical products
they offer than to the benefits produced by these products. They see themselves
as selling a product rather than providing a solution to a need. The
importance of physical goods lies not so much in owning them as in the benefits
they provide. We don't buy food to look at, but because it satisfies our hunger. We
don't buy a microwave to admire, but because it cooks our food. A manufacturer
of drill bits may think that the customer needs a drill bit, but what the customer
really needs is a hole. These sellers may suffer from 'marketing myopia'.4 They
are so taken with their products that they focus only on existing wants and lose
sight of underlying customer needs. They forget that a physical product is only a
tool to solve a consumer problem. These sellers have trouble if a new product
comes along that serves the need better or less expensively. The customer with
the same need will -want the new product.