Financing and Marketing Management

Unit 7 - The Core concepts of marketing

7.3. Products
People satisfy their needs and wants through consumption of goods and services. We will define goods and services or products broadly to cover anything that can be offered to someone to satisfy a need or want. Normally the word product brings to mind a physical object, such as an automobile, a television set or a soft drink. And we normally use the expression products and services to distinguish between physical objects and intangible ones. But in thinking about physical products, their importance lies not so much in owning them as in using them to satisfy our wants. We don’t buy a car to look at but because it supplies a service. Thus physical products are really vehicles that deliver services to us.
In fact, services are also supplied by other vehicles, such as persons, places, activities, organizations and ideas. Manufacturers get into a lot of trouble by paying more attention to their physical products than to the services produced by these products. Manufacturers love their products but forget that customers buy them because they satisfy a need. The marketer’s job is to sell the benefits or services built into physical products rather than just describe their physical features.