Tutor-Led Workshop 5

New Brands
MOD004152 International Marketing and Brand Management

Module Leader: Grace Famiyoro

Lecturer in Marketing and Strategy
Faculty of Business and Law
Anglia Ruskin University
What is a product?
• A product is something that is produced and offered for sale in
the market.
• Digital technologies have made new forms of products possible.
• Products as a service
• Car2Go
• Drive Now
• Software as a service
• Google apps
• DropBox
• Zoom
• Product sharing
• Airbnb
• Uber/Lyft
Brands and Product
• How they get the job done
• Solution and benefits
• As marketers how to differentiate our market offering from the competition

• Marketers need to innovate not just rely of sustaining strategy

modes

• Digital Darwinism (Ingledew, 2017)

• Industry 4.0 technologies can transform and create new, business

models, products and lead to product improvements
Product Levels
1. Core/Generic Product
• Job to be done
2. Actual Product
• Quality, packaging, features,
brand name, capabilities,
design/styling
3. Augmented/Extended Product
• After-sales support, warranty,
customer service, delivery and
credit, personnel, installation

• Good-service continuum (Shostack, 1982)

• A shift from ownership to usership

Too many benefits?
• Feature fatigue – Keane and Stamm (2005)

• Technological advances make it possible to add on

many extra features

• Customers may purchase feature-laden products

because of expected utility, but ultimately suffer from
lower experience utility
• Because they do not actually use many of these features!
It's all about experience
• Products are complex bundles of benefits
• All perceptive

• Customer experience is the key

• Moments of truth
• Customer experience is an attribute
Product portfolio management
• Product portfolio, also
called a product mix, is
the number of product
lines being offered by a
company.

• Product line is any one

type of product in the
product mix.

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• Product line width is the number of product lines in a
product mix.

• For instance, if a company offers milk and yogurts, it

indicates that it has two lines. Similarly, a cosmetic
company manufactures four different types of products –
jewelry, cosmetics, fashion, and household items. Its
product mix width is 4.
Moments of Truth (MoT)
• A moment of truth is a moment in the customer journey at
which the relationship between the customer and the brand is
at stake

• Zero moment of truth (ZMOT) online research pre-purchase

• First moment of truth (FMOT) at point of purchase (POP)
• Second moment of truth (SMOT) post-purchase
• Third moment of truth (TMOT) moment of customer feedback
Micro-moments
• In addition to MoT, micro-moments are intent-driven
moments of decision-making and preference-shaping that
occur throughout the entire consumer journey

• They focus on the different motives and desires customers

may experience on the path to purchase
• Short bursts of time discovering relevant information
online
• Want-to-know moments
• Want-to-go moments
• Want-to-do moments
• Want-to-buy moments
 Innovations
• Innovation is anything that customers perceive as new.

• Radical innovations introduce a truly new design that displaces previous design.

• Discontinuous innovations are “new to the world” products.

• Disruptive innovation occurs when a new entrant in a market offers a functional

alternative to the underserved, often times at a lower price.

• Continuous innovations involves an incremental change in product design,

product components, and/or related processes.

• Social innovation is defined as new solutions for social issues that are more
efficient, effective, and sustainable than the existing ones.

• Agile innovation is the art of making hard things easy and creating new viable
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business offerings faster.
New Product Development
Process
1. Ideation
• Technological innovations, unmet buyer needs, co-creation concepts

2. Viability
• Technical feasibility, patent search, market research to assess market attractiveness, ball-park costing

3. Development
• Competitive teardowns, CAD prototype, 3D prototype, process mapping

4. Brand development
• Branding, package design and prototype, business case, strategy brief

5. Protect and Produce

• Patent, trademark, registered design applications, secure production, test marketing

6. Commercialisation
• Go-to-market
The
product
life cycle

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1. Introduction Stage
• First appears onto the market

• No sales and no profit – generating a loss at this stage

due to the investment in development

• Significant expenditure in marketing and promotion

• The majority of products do not make it past this stage

2. Growth Stage
• Sales from the product quickly rise, profits accelerate rapidly

• Consumers are now aware of the product attributes and are rapidly purchasing it

• Competitors are also aware of the product and offer market alternatives

• The company may respond by adding more features to add appeal

• Efforts must be made to improve brand loyalty

• Profits tend to fall towards the end of the growth stage as a result of the
competition and the subsequent activities (likely price promotion)
3. Maturity Stage
• The sales of the product peak and begin to decline, profit
margins also continue to decline

• Competition becomes intense

• Differentiation becomes key focus in marketing, especially in

terms of value offered relative to competitor offerings

• Customers are now able to make experienced and informed

decisions
 Maturity stage repositioning
methods
• Reverse positioning removes
some product attributes while
adding new ones.

• Breakaway positioning
associates the product with a
different category.

• Stealth positioning disguises the

product’s true nature as it
attracts new customers.
“It’s not just that we wanted to break the ice with a piece of software that
people would view as a game rather than a communications application,”
one Sony executive explained. “It’s also that we wanted to establish the
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EyeToy hardware in people’s minds as a plaything rather than a scary
4. Decline Stage
• Sales fall very quickly

• Customer tastes may have changed, competition may

have become stronger

• Companies focus on new product development to

replace the products at decline stage
The Innovation Adoption Curve
• The product life cycle shows how sales vary over
time, but another view of the life of an innovation
can be seen through the innovation adoption
model.

• The innovation adoption model illustrates the

diffusion of the innovation by the relative
percentage of customers who adopt it at each
stage.

• Product adoption is the process by which a

consumer or business customer begins to buy
and use a new good, service, or idea.

• The term diffusion describes how the use of a

product spreads throughout a population (Muller,
Peres and Mahajan, 2009)
Success?
• The point between early adopters and early majority is called
the “chasm” (Moore, 1991).

• This is a critical point, sometimes called the tipping point,

because a product is unlikely to succeed if it cannot cross the
chasm to reach the early majority.

• Innovators and early adopters are interested in new

technologies and prone to try innovations. But the early
majority will not adopt until the product is perceived as reliable
and advantageous. They may also wait until prices drop.
Five Factors Driving Adoption
• Relative advantage is the degree to which the innovation is perceived
as better than the incumbent product (or nothing if no product met the
need).

• Compatibility is the degree to which the product is compatible with

any existing equipment and/or buyer values.

• Simplicity is the degree to which the product is easy to understand and

use.

• Observability is the degree to which prospects are exposed to the

product and can see others using the product.

• Trialability is the degree to which the product can be used prior to

making a commitment.
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 The Hype
Cycle

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 The Five Phases of a
Technology’s Life Cycle
• In the first phase, a research breakthrough serves as a technology trigger.

• In the second phase, the peak of inflated expectations, there is a lot of buzz about
the technology, but the technology is unproven.

• The third phase is the trough of disillusionment, during which first-to-market

products are introduced but many fail. Businesses want first-mover advantages but
being first also comes with risk.

• The fourth stage is the slope of enlightenment, at which point practical benefits of
the technology emerge.

• The fifth stage is the plateau of productivity, when the market is ready to adopt
products with the new technology and mass adoption is feasible. This is when mass
adoption really beds in and it’s much easier for customers to commit to the new tech.
The Hype Cycle
• New products based on the technology will not be
introduced until the technology reaches the third stage
of the hype cycle, and even then, the introduction is
risky.

• Only if the technology reaches the fourth stage are

products based on it likely to succeed in the market.
Canvas Activity
• Reflecting on the theory discussed
in this tutor-led workshop, discuss
the following, using the canvas
discussion thread:

Can you think of

an innovation which is
either at the peak of
inflated expectations or at
the trough of
disillusionment?
Image reference: whatsonlanarkshire.co.uk (2020)