New Products and Services, Managing Successful Products Services and Brands, and Services Marketing

While reading Chapter 10, I learned that from the important perspective of the consumer, newness is often seen as the degree of learning that a consumer must engage in to use the product. With continuous innovation, no new behaviors must be learned. With dynamically continuous innovation, only minor behavioral changes are needed. With a discontinuous innovation, consumers must learn entirely new consumption patterns. I never thought of it that way, so this was a new learning experience for me.

While reading Chapter 11, I learned that the product lifecycle describes the stages a new product goes through in the marketplace, which are introduction, growth, maturity, and decline. Marketing executives manage a product's life cycle by modifying the product itself by altering its characteristics such as product quality, performance, or appearance. It was one of those things that you do notice in the world but never think about, so this was quite eye opening.

While reading Chapter 12, I learned that because services are intangible, pre-purchase evaluation is difficult for consumers. To choose a service, consumers use search, experience, and credence qualities to evaluate the product and service elements of an offering. I do this to with my purchasing decisions, so it was nice to feel validated reading about this.