Product

Without a product, one cannot market. Marketing was invented for the purposes of promoting and selling products, so you could say that products are the founding principles of marketing. Whether you're a strapping machine manufacturer or a holistic soap maker, before you can make money through marketing, you have to establish a reliable product that will meet some sort of need in the consumer base. In this series of articles, we will discuss the various ways products affect marketing, and how marketing can be used to promote specific products.

One of the important aspects of products as related to marketing that we will discuss is the specifications of the product. Each product is unique, even if they are designed to fulfill the same niche in the market. A bathroom vanity is not simply a bathroom vanity to someone with an eye for marketing. It has been specifically designed and manufactured to be different in some way than all other bathroom vanities. It's composition, manufacturing process, warranty, available colors, all sorts of aspects come into play in a product's specifications. Through marketing, these differences can be capitalized upon to promote the product over other similar products in the same niche.

Once you have learned all about the importance of product specifications, we will move on to how the product meets a consumer's wants or needs. A lot of scientific research and experimental development, or SR ED, goes into learning exactly what customers want when it comes to products, as well as into applying the principles learned during these studies to the engineering of the product. Without people who want or need to accomplish something, there can be no use in designing or marketing a tool to help them in this process. This is another aspect of products that makes them important in marketing.

A large part of the role of products in marketing is accomplished through a process called "branding" which we will also investigate during our journey through the aspects of marketing. We will learn how branding helps consumers identify and favor certain products over others, and why a plain real estate web site company with no connections will not do as well as the exact same site which has been branded with the logo of a major national real estate chain such as ReMax or Coldwell Banker.

Once we understand all this, we will begin to grasp how marketers see the world. They view products not just as something they have to sell or something a company happened to invent, but rather as the solution to a problem. For instance, if you are having trouble selling Mississauga homes for sale, marketers would find you a product, such as a sign or a website, which would help you accomplish your goal of selling. In this way, marketing has helped you solve your problem by providing you with a useful product.