Exam 13: Setting Product Strategy

What is the significance of design for a company's products and services? What are the advantages of a good design?

You have been asked to prepare a product-line analysis for your company's stable of products. Why is it important for product-line mangers to do a product-line analysis?

Realizing that although household products is a huge category - taking up an entire supermarket aisle or more - it is an incredibly boring one, the founders of Method Products designed a sleek, uncluttered dish soap container that also carried functional advantages, such as ease of dispensing soap and cleaning. Method is competing in the crowded market for household products on the basis of superior ________.

You know that marketers have traditionally classified products based on characteristics of durability, tangibility, and use. You also know that each product type has an appropriate marketing-mix strategy attached. In analyzing your company's products, you decide to list each of these products and the appropriate marketing-mix strategy to understand where your products "fit." List these products and their appropriate marketing-mix strategies.

Many sellers offer either general or specific guarantees. Guarantees reduce the buyer's ________ risk.

Packaging includes the activities of designing and producing a container for a product.

Most products are established at one of four performance levels: low, average, high, or superior. For example, mountain bikes come in a variety of sizes and physical attributes. When a consumer purchases a mountain bike costing $1,000, he or she expects the bike to perform to specifications and to have a high ________, meeting the promised specifications.

Design thinking requires intensive ethnographic studies of consumers, creative brainstorming sessions, and collaborative teamwork to decide how to bring the design idea to reality.

Explain the concept of line stretching and the three uses for it.

The cost of processing a return can be significantly greater than that of an outbound shipment.

Companies normally develop ________ rather than single products and require sellers to establish perceived quality differences between price steps within it.

Smith & Adams Poultry has recently upgraded its transactional model such that its customers (restaurants and hotels) can communicate with its central supply system to indicate purchase volumes, dates, and receive confirmation, through their computer terminals. This is an example of a company differentiating itself versus competition in terms of ________.

________ are major purchases and are usually bought directly from the producer with the typical sale preceded by long negotiation periods.

The homogeneity of natural materials limits the amount of demand-creation activity that producers undertake.

In discussions with the packaging design team, you note that they do not have a firm design objective for the final package. In an internal memo to your boss, outline the objectives (both company and consumer oriented) that you wish to see implemented by the design team.

Design can shift consumer perceptions to make brand experiences more rewarding.

The common denominators of luxury brands are quality and ________.

Product line analysis provides information for two key decision areas - product line length and product mix pricing.

________ has overtaken the United States as the world's largest luxury market; it's forecast that one-third of all high-end goods will be sold there in the coming years.

Many products can be differentiated in terms of their ________, which is its size, shape, or physical structure.