Consumer Goods

Categories of Consumer Goods

Consumer goods can be classified in different ways. Depending on the frequency and duration of their usage, the following categories can be distinguished:

• Durable goods can be used repeatedly or continuously for an extended period of time. This category comprises, for example, furniture, bicycles, and major household appliances.
• Semidurable goods can be used on multiple occasions and have an expected lifetime of about 1 year, such as clothing and footwear.
• Nondurable goods are normally consumed in one or a few uses. Groceries, gasoline, and tobacco products belong to this category. In practice, nondurable goods also include a few goods of little value that are used more than once, such as household supplies.

Marketers usually classify consumer goods on the basis of the type of the buying decision process. Varying marketing strategies and instruments are used to market products and services belonging to the different classes of goods:

• Convenience goods are those that the consumer usually purchases frequently, often on impulse, with little time and effort spent on the buying process. Examples include toothpaste, newspapers, and candy bars. Convenience products usually are low-priced, and marketers place them in many locations to make them readily available for customers.
• Shopping goods are less frequently bought consumer products and services that the consumer, in the process of selection and purchase, usually compares carefully on bases such as suitability, quality, price, and style. Examples include furniture, a used car, a better dress, or hair treatment for which the consumer is willing to spend considerable time and effort in gathering information on relevant product attributes. Several retail outlets are customarily visited. Marketers usually distribute their products through fewer outlets but provide deeper sales support to help customers in their comparison efforts.
• Specialty goods are high-risk, expensive, and very infrequently bought consumer products and services. They have unique attributes or other characteristics that make them singularly important to the buyer and require an extensive problem-solving decision process. Consumers make a special purchasing effort to buy products such as specific brands and types of cars, designer clothes, and the services of legal specialists. The products in this category need very specialist retailing that will provide a high level of augmented product services, both before and after sale.
• Unsought goods are consumer products and services that the consumer either does not know about or knows about but does not normally think of buying. Most major product innovations are unsought until the consumer becomes aware of them through advertising. Examples of unsought goods are life insurance, gravestones, and encyclopedias. To sell these goods, marketers make a lot of advertising, personal selling, and other marketing efforts.

Consumers' Perceptions of Products and Services

Consumers have different types of product knowledge that they can use to make purchase decisions. When developing marketing strategies, marketers analyze and focus on different levels of consumers' product knowledge. Consumers can think about products as bundles of attributes. Even the simplest products have several attributes (e.g., pencils have varying lead densities, softness of erasers, shapes, and colors). More complex products such as cars and DVD players have many attributes. When deciding which products to buy, consumers usually consider only a few selected product attributes. Consumers often think about products as bundles of benefits. Benefits are the desirable consequences consumers seek when buying and using products and brands (e.g., Consumer A wants a toothpaste that whitens the teeth; Consumer B wants a toothpaste that prevents tooth decay). Consumers also assess the personal, symbolic values that goods help them to satisfy or achieve.

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