EOC - Marketing Mix : Product

“Comparison shopping has never been easier. Millions of bytes of information are just a click away. Shopping for a new high-definition television and would like to compare offerings? No problem! Just search “hdtv comparison guide” in an online search engine such as Google and more than a million results return. Google experimented with returning a greater number of results per page and found usage dropped off because it took a fraction of a second longer for results to appear—too long for today’s consumers.” (Marketing an Introduction, Armstrong/Kolter, 170) In a competitive world it is imperative to make sure that the product itself is in some way more worthwhile to the customer base than other businesses in the same competitive markets. This is especially important in an environment with extremely convenient means of getting products in various ways. For instance, “[w]ith a simple touch, you will be able to order a pizza, get the weather forecast, find the perfect recipe, watch a YouTube video, and, oh yeah, make a phone call. That call will be delivered through VoIP technology, which stands for Voice over Internet Protocol. Forecasters predict that 20 to 50 million households will adopt this technology by 2013, depending on whether service providers subsidize the cost of the new media phone devices. There is a substantial business market for media phones as well. They will be found in offices and hotel rooms around the world. “ (Marketing an Introduction, Armstrong/Kolter, 239)