The Product Strategy

The Product
The product may or may not be a tangible one – it refers to anything that can be offered to the market to satisfy human wants. Product could include tangible goods, services, experiences, events, ideas, people, places, organizations and information.


The Product Hierarchy –

Need Family – Snacking
Product Family – Biscuits
Product Class – Healthy Biscuits
Product Line – Sunfeast
Product Type – Sunfeast Farmlite Biscuits









The Product Level -

The product can be divided in five distinct product levels, each level adds more customer value and this constitutes the customer- value hierarchy.

1. The Core Benefit – The service or benefit that the customer is really buying. In the case of Farmlite Biscuits, it includes the benefit of snacking with the evening tea.


2. The Basic Product – The marketer must turn the core benefit into a basic product – the snacking benefit is derived by consumption of biscuits.


3. The Expected Product – This includes a set of attributes buyers normally expect when they purchase the product. In this case, the buyers expect a healthier version of biscuits and not the regular flour biscuits that are available in the market. Hence, ITC food division decided to introduce a health biscuit for its consumers, instead of flour, they introduced oats biscuits.


4. The Augmented Product – The product is made such that it exceeds the expectation of the consumer. ITC did this by introducing 2 variants – Oats & Raisins and Oats & Almonds. There aren’t any health biscuits in the market which have dry fruits in them.

5. The Potential Product – In encompasses all the possible augmentations and transformations the product or offering might undergo in the future. ITC can do this by introducing new variants in the category such as Ragi Biscuits and Oats Biscuits with Honey etc and expand its market share