Developing a product or service involves defining the benefits that it will offer. These benefits are communicated and delivered by product attributes such as quality, features, and style and design.

Product Quality

Product quality is one of the marketer’s major positioning tools. Quality affects product or service performance; thus, it is closely linked to customer value and satisfaction. In the narrowest sense, quality can be defined as “no defects.” But most marketers go beyond this narrow definition. Instead, they define quality in terms of creating customer value and satisfaction. The American Society for Quality defines quality as the characteristics of a product or service that bear on its ability to satisfy stated or implied customer needs. Similarly, Siemens defines quality this way: “Quality is when our customers come back and our products don’t.”7

Total quality management (TQM) is an approach in which all of the company’s people are involved in constantly improving the quality of products, services, and business processes. For most top companies, customer-driven quality has become a way of doing business. Today, companies are taking a return-on-quality approach, viewing quality as an investment and holding quality efforts accountable for bottom-line results.

Product quality has two dimensions: level and consistency. In developing a product, the marketer must first choose a quality level that will support the product’s positioning. Here, product quality means performance quality—the product’s ability to perform its functions. For example, a Rolls-Royce provides higher performance quality than a Chevrolet: It has a smoother ride, lasts longer, and provides more handcraftsmanship, custom design, luxury, and “creature comforts.” Companies rarely try to offer the highest possible performance quality level; few customers want or can afford the high levels of quality offered in products such as a Rolls-Royce automobile, a Viking range, or a Rolex watch. Instead, companies choose a quality level that matches target market needs and the quality levels of competing products.

Beyond quality level, high quality also can mean high levels of quality consistency. Here, product quality means conformance quality—freedom from defects and consistency in delivering a targeted level of performance. All companies should strive for high levels of conformance quality. In this sense, a Chevrolet can have just as much quality as a Rolls-Royce. Although a Chevy doesn’t perform at the same level as a Rolls-Royce, it can just as consistently deliver the quality that customers pay for and expect.

Similarly, the Chick-fil-A fast-food chain doesn’t aspire to provide gourmet dining experiences. However, by consistently meeting or exceeding customers’ quality expectations, the chain has earned a trophy case full of awards for top food and service quality. Last year, for instance, the chain was the only restaurant named to 24/7 Wall Street’s Customer Service Hall of Fame, based on a survey of 2,500 adults asked about the quality of customer service at 150 of America’s best-known companies across 15 industries. Chick-fil-A placed second overall, alongside the likes of Amazon, Marriott, and Apple.8 Although it doesn’t try to be Ritz-Carlton, it does send its managers to the Ritz-Carlton quality training program, where they learn things such as how to greet customers and how to probe for and serve unexpressed needs. Such consistency in meeting quality expectations has helped Chick-fil-A build a following of fiercely loyal customers.

Perhaps the most distinctive skill of professional marketers is their ability to build and manage brands. A brand is a name, term, sign, symbol, or design or a combination of these that identifies the maker or seller of a product or service. Consumers view a brand as an important part of a product, and branding can add value to a consumer’s purchase. Customers attach meanings to brands and develop brand relationships. As a result, brands have meaning well beyond a product’s physical attributes. Consider this story:10

One Tuesday evening in January, Joshua Bell, one of the world’s finest violinists, played at Boston’s stately Symphony Hall before a packed audience who’d paid an average of $100 a seat. Based on the well-earned strength of the “Joshua Bell brand,” the talented musician routinely drew standing-room-only audiences at all of his performances around the world. Three days later, however, as part of a Washington Post social experiment, Bell found himself standing in a Washington, DC, metro station, dressed in jeans, a T-shirt, and a Washington Nationals baseball cap. As morning commuters streamed by, Bell pulled out his $4 million Stradivarius violin, set the open case at his feet, and began playing the same revered classics he’d played in Boston. During the next 45 minutes, some 1,100 people passed by but few stopped to listen. Bell earned a total of $32. No one recognized the “unbranded” Bell, so few ­appreciated his artistry. What does that tell you about the meaning of a strong brand?

Branding has become so strong that today hardly anything goes unbranded. Salt is packaged in branded containers, common nuts and bolts are packaged with a distributor’s label, and automobile parts—spark plugs, tires, filters—bear brand names that differ from those of the automakers. Even fruits, vegetables, dairy products, and poultry are branded—Cuties mandarin oranges, Dole Classic salads, Horizon Organic milk, Perdue chickens, and Eggland’s Best eggs.

Branding helps buyers in many ways. Brand names help consumers identify products that might benefit them. Brands also say something about product quality and consistency—buyers who always buy the same brand know that they will get the same features, benefits, and quality each time they buy. Branding also gives the seller several advantages. The seller’s brand name and trademark provide legal protection for unique product features that otherwise might be copied by competitors. Branding helps the seller to segment markets. For example, rather than offering just one general product to all consumers, Toyota can offer the different Lexus, Toyota, and Scion brands, each with numerous sub-brands—such as Avalon, Camry, Corolla, Prius, Yaris, Tundra, and Land Cruiser.

Finally, a brand name becomes the basis on which a whole story can be built about a product’s special qualities. For example, the Cuties brand of pint-sized mandarins sets itself apart from ordinary oranges by promising “Kids love Cuties because Cuties are made for kids.” They are a healthy snack that’s “perfect for little hands”: sweet, seedless, kid-sized, and easy to peel.11 Building and managing brands are perhaps the marketer’s most important tasks. We will discuss branding strategy in more detail later in the chapter.

Packaging involves designing and producing the container or wrapper for a product. Traditionally, the primary function of the package was to hold and protect the product. In recent times, however, packaging has become an important marketing tool as well. Increased competition and clutter on retail store shelves means that packages must now perform many sales tasks—from attracting buyers to communicating brand positioning to closing the sale. Not every customer will see a brand’s advertising, social media pages, or other promotions. However, all consumers who buy and use a product will interact regularly with its packaging. Thus, the humble package represents prime marketing space.

Companies realize the power of good packaging to create immediate consumer recognition of a brand. For example, an average supermarket stocks about 42,000 items; the average Walmart supercenter carries 120,000 items. The typical shopper makes three out of four purchase decisions in stores and passes by some 300 items per minute. In this highly competitive environment, the package may be the seller’s best and last chance to influence buyers. So the package itself becomes an important promotional medium.12

Innovative packaging can give a company an advantage over competitors and boost sales. Distinctive packaging may even become an important part of a brand’s identity. For example, an otherwise plain brown carton imprinted with the familiar curved arrow from the Amazon.com logo—variously interpreted as “a to z” or even a smiley face—leaves no doubt as to who shipped the package sitting at your doorstep. And Tiffany’s distinctive blue boxes have come to embody the exclusive jewelry retailer’s premium legacy and positioning. As the company puts it, “Glimpsed on a busy street or resting in the palm of a hand, Tiffany Blue Boxes make hearts beat faster and epitomize Tiffany’s great heritage of elegance, exclusivity, and flawless craftsmanship.”13

Poorly designed packages can cause headaches for consumers and lost sales for the company. Think about all those hard-to-open packages, such as DVD cases sealed with impossibly sticky labels, packaging with finger-splitting wire twist-ties, or sealed plastic clamshell containers that cause “wrap rage” and send thousands of people to the hospital each year with lacerations and puncture wounds. Another packaging issue is overpackaging—as when a tiny USB flash drive in an oversized cardboard and plastic display package is delivered in a giant corrugated shipping carton. Overpackaging creates an incredible amount of waste, frustrating those who care about the environment.

Amazon offers Frustration-Free Packaging to alleviate both wrap rage and overpackaging. The online retailer works with more than 2,000 companies, such as Fisher-Price, Mattel, Unilever, Microsoft, and others, to create smaller, easy-to-open, recyclable packages that use less packaging material and no frustrating plastic clamshells or wire ties. It currently offers more than 200,000 such items and to date has shipped more than 75 million of them to 175 countries. In the process, the initiative has eliminated nearly 60 million square feet of cardboard and 25 million pounds of packaging waste.14

In recent years, product safety has also become a major packaging concern. We have all learned to deal with hard-to-open “childproof” packaging. Due to the rash of product tampering scares in the 1980s, most drug producers and food makers now put their products in tamper-resistant packages. In making packaging decisions, the company also must heed growing environmental concerns. Fortunately, many companies have gone “green” by reducing their packaging and using environmentally responsible packaging materials.

Labels and logos range from simple tags attached to products to complex graphics that are part of the packaging. They perform several functions. At the very least, the label identifies the product or brand, such as the name Sunkist stamped on oranges. The label might also describe several things about the product—who made it, where it was made, when it was made, its contents, how it is to be used, and how to use it safely. Finally, the label might help to promote the brand and engage customers. For many companies, labels have become an important element in broader marketing campaigns.

Labels and brand logos can support the brand’s positioning and add personality to the brand. In fact, they can become a crucial element in the brand-customer connection. Customers often become strongly attached to logos as symbols of the brands they represent. Consider the feelings evoked by the logos of companies such as Google, Coca-Cola, Twitter, Apple, and Nike. Logos must be redesigned from time to time. For example, brands ranging from Yahoo!, eBay, and Southwest Airlines to Wendy’s, Pizza Hut, Black+Decker, and Hershey have successfully adapted their logos to keep them contemporary and to meet the needs of new digital devices and interactive platforms such as the mobile apps and social media (see Real Marketing 8.1).

However, companies must take care when changing such important brand symbols. Customers often form strong connections to the visual representations of their brands and may react strongly to changes. For example, a few years ago when Gap introduced a more contemporary redesign of its familiar old logo—the well-known white text on a blue square—customers went ballistic and imposed intense online pressure. Gap reinstated the old logo after only one week.

Along with the positives, there has been a long history of legal concerns about labels and packaging. The Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914 held that false, misleading, or deceptive labels or packages constitute unfair competition. Labels can mislead customers, fail to describe important ingredients, or fail to include needed safety warnings. As a result, several federal and state laws regulate labeling. The most prominent is the Fair Packaging and Labeling Act of 1966, which set mandatory labeling requirements, encouraged voluntary industry packaging standards, and allowed federal agencies to set packaging regulations in specific industries. The Nutritional Labeling and Educational Act of 1990 requires sellers to provide detailed nutritional information on food products, and recent sweeping actions by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulate the use of health-related terms such as low fat, light, high fiber, and organic. Sellers must ensure that their labels contain all the required information.

Customer service is another element of product strategy. A company’s offer usually includes some support services, which can be a minor part or a major part of the total offering. Later in this chapter, we will discuss services as products in themselves. Here, we discuss services that augment actual products.

Support services are an important part of the customer’s overall brand experience. Lexus knows that good marketing doesn’t end with making a sale. Keeping customers happy after the sale is the key to building lasting relationships. Lexus believes that if you delight the customer, and continue to delight the customer, you will have a customer for life. So Lexus dealers across the country will go to almost any lengths to take care of customers and keep them coming back:15

The typical Lexus dealership is, well, anything but typical. For example, in addition to its Starbucks coffee shop, one Florida Lexus dealership features four massage chairs, two putting greens, two customer lounges, and a library. At another Lexus dealership in a nearby city, “guests” leave their cars with a valet and are then guided by a concierge to a European-style coffee bar offering complimentary espresso, cappuccino, and a selection of pastries prepared by a chef trained in Rome. But at Lexus, customer service goes much deeper than just dealership amenities. From the very start, Lexus set out to revolutionize the auto ownership experience.

Of course, Lexus knows that the best dealership visit is the one you never have to make. So it builds customer-pleasing cars to start with. In its “Lexus Covenant,” the company vows that it will make “the finest cars ever built”—high-quality cars that need little servicing. However, the covenant also vows to value customers as important individuals and “treat each customer as we would a guest in our own home.” So, when a car does need servicing, Lexus goes out of its way to make it easy and painless. Most dealers will even pick up a car and then return it when the maintenance is finished. And the car comes back spotless, thanks to a complimentary cleaning. You might even be surprised to find that they’ve touched up a door ding to help restore the car to its fresh-from-the-factory luster.

By all accounts, Lexus has lived up to its ambitious customer-satisfaction promise. It has created what appear to be the world’s most satisfied car owners. Lexus regularly tops not just the industry quality ratings but also customer-satisfaction ratings in both the United States and globally. “My wife will never buy another car except a Lexus,” says one satisfied Lexus owner. “They come to our house, pick up the car, do an oil change, spiff it up, and bring it back. She’s sold for life.”

The first step in designing support services is to survey customers periodically to assess the value of current services and obtain ideas for new ones. Once the company has assessed the quality of various support services to customers, it can take steps to fix problems and add new services that will both delight customers and yield profits to the company.

Many companies now use a sophisticated mix of phone, email, online, social media, mobile, and interactive voice and data technologies to provide support services that were not possible before. For example, home-improvement store Lowe’s offers a vigorous dose of customer service at both its store and online locations that makes shopping easier, answers customer questions, and handles problems. Customers can access Lowe’s extensive support by phone, email ([email protected]), website, mobile app, and Twitter via @LowesCares. The Lowe’s website and mobile app link to a buying guide and how-to library. In its stores, Lowe’s has equipped employees with 42,000 iPhones filled with custom apps and add-on hardware, letting them perform service tasks such as checking inventory at nearby stores, looking up specific customer purchase histories, sharing how-to videos, and checking competitor prices—all without leaving the customer’s side. Lowe’s is even experimenting with putting interactive, talking, moving robots in stores that can greet customers as they enter, answer even their most vexing questions, and guide them to whatever merchandise they are seeking.16