A company must develop a great offering. Samsung offers a 40-inch flat-screen TV that can be bought for $399, 99. The total cost of ownership is relatively small. This product has an extensive range of features such as a built-in Wi-fi and a 60 Hz refresh rate. Such features make this product valuable for the customers. The offering also includes such benefits as a one year warranty and SMART cable is also included. A company may be pressured to add service to their offerings (Bustinza, Parry and Vendrell‐Herrero 619). This offering provides several services such as Samsung Apps. However, it is more product dominant because those services are not as important for the customer as the primary product. There are tangible aspects such as a design of the product and TV picture quality. However, there are some intangible aspects such as reliability, quality of support of additional services and others.
This particular offering belongs to the category of shopping offerings. Customers carefully research such offerings to find the best possible option that would meet all of their expectations. The brand name plays an enormous role when consumers review this kind of proposition. Topaloglu states that “companies offer a set of products that can serve as substitutes for each other, and the customers make a choice among the set of offered products” (1182). This means that it is extremely hard for a client to make a final decision because of a variety of offerings. It would be wise for Samsung to focus on the “thinkers” market segment. However, the category of the offering would not change based on a new target market because this is a traditional category for such types of products.
Samsung should consider a slight modification of the current product so it can satisfy all the requirements of the new target market. The company should extend the product line, and a few new models of a product should be considered. However, no significant changes should be made because it may affect other segments. The product line extension would allow Samsung to compete with Panasonic if the company develops a new cheaper model of flat-screen TVs. The company may also try to occupy the place in the market that is currently uncontested. Axarloglou claims that “excessive product line extensions might confuse consumers, depress brand loyalty, and increase production complexity and administrative cost without necessarily an increase in total sales for the product category” (9). This means that a company should be extremely careful when making decisions to extend product lines because it may cause some marketing problems.
It is necessary to manage the life cycle of a product on each stage. Currently, Samsung flat-screen TVs are at the stage of maturity in their life cycle. The changes proposed in the previous paragraph should extend the current period of the life cycle. If a company introduces such models of a product that are not available on the market, it will cause interest from the customers. However, competitors may soon introduce similar models of the flat-screen TVs, so such interest is only temporary. Some systems assist with the management of the product lifecycle (Wang et al. 195). Such systems are extremely helpful for managers. Overall, a company needs to take all possible measures to make sure that the product does not enter the last stage of decline with such methods as a continuous promotion.
Works Cited
Axarloglou, Kostas. “Product Line Extensions: Causes and Effects.” Managerial and Decision Economics 29.1 (2008): 9-21.
Bustinza, F. Oscar, Glenn C. Parry, and Ferran Vendrell‐Herrero. “Supply and Demand Chain Management: the Effect of Adding Services to Product Offerings.” Supply Chain Management: An International Journal 18.6 (2013): 618-629.
Topaloglu, Huseyin. “Joint Stocking and Product Offer Decisions Under the Multinomial Logit Model.” Production and Operations Management 22.5 (2013): 1182-1199.
Wang, Zhaoxia, Arthur H. M. ter Hofstede, Chun Ouyang, Moe Wynn, Jianmin Wang, and Xiaochen Zhu. “How to Guarantee Compliance Between Workflows and Product Lifecycles?” Information Systems 42 (2014): 195-215.