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Unit 6: Products, Services and Brands

keep their branches open on Sundays. Union Bank of India introduced ‘Insured Recurring Deposit’, Notes
adding Life Insurance to recurring deposit.
Ideally, augmentations should be such that cannot be easily copied by competitors. In any case,
the service provider who regularly adds innovative features important from consumers’ point
of view gains a succession of temporary competitive advantages and earns a reputation of being
the leader in introducing innovations.

Example: FedEx has been the first to install software to make it easier for customers to
track packages in transit.

Self Assessment

Fill in the Blanks:
7. The extended marketing mix for services includes people, process and ………………….

8. The ……………… characteristics that define services include reliability, care and empathy.
9. Most salons have great interiors and soothing ambience. This is usually to overcome
………………… feature of services.
10. There is lack of uniformity and increased level of customization in services due
to………………… feature of services.
11. In a restaurant, rock music is being played but it’s quite possible that many people don’t
like it. This might lead to Gap ………………….
12. An educational institute has by mistake printed the wrong telephone numbers on its
pamphlets. This may nonetheless lead to Gap ………………….

6.3 Brands

A brand is a name, term, sign, symbol or design or a combination of them, intended to identify
the goods and services of one seller or group of sellers and the differentiate them from those of
the competition. Brand identify refers to a unique set of brand associations that the brand
strategist aspires to create or maintain. Packaging includes all activities that focus on the
development of a container and a graphic design for a product.

Branding is a major decision issue in managing products. Well-known brands have the power to
command price premium. Today, the brands Mercedes, IBM, Sony, Canon and others enjoy a
huge brand-loyal market.

Did u know? As noted earlier, most competition in developed and developing economies
is essentially hot at product augmentation level because most companies in an industry
can successfully develop and produce satisfactory products at the expected level. Nearly
45 years earlier, Prof. Theodore Levitt wrote, “The new competition is not between what
companies can produce in their factories but between what they add to their factory
output in the form of packaging, services, advertising, customer service, financing, delivery
arrangements, warehousing, and things people value.” Thus, a brand is much more than
what AMA definition describes. It is a product, but one that adds other dimensions
differentiating it in some way from other products designed to satisfy the same need
(Kevin Lane Keller, Strategic Brand Management, 2nd ed., 2003). These other differences
include not only tangible and rational aspects related to brand performance, but also
intangible, emotional, and symbolic meanings consumers perceive the brand represents.

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