Introduction
Offerings as tangible goods or intangible services designed to deliver value to customers either to fulfill their needs, satisfy their wants, or both. To know what are the consumer offerings, we need to understand that the offerings include tangible products, intangible products like services, and prices. The concept of Total Cost of Ownership is for businesses to compare their offerings. It is the total amount of time and money spent to acquire and use an offering. For instance, Costco or Walmart may offer you better prices, but their locations can be very far away from you. So, if you add the fuel costs, and the time your drive to their store, the prices may be approximately the same or even more costly. It is one of the basic rules of how we make our purchasing decisions. According to the book, Principles of Marketing, written by Tanner, J. & Raymond in 2015, there are four types of consumer offerings, Convenience offerings, Shopping offerings, Specialty offerings, and Unsought offerings. Each of the four types is intended for customer use. So, let's discuss each of these categories.
The Four Types of Consumer Offerings
I. Convenience Offerings
Just like the word convenience, they are products and services consumers don’t want to put much effort into because there is very little difference between competing brands. For many consumers, bottled water is an example of convenience offering. A consumer might choose the store in which to buy the bottled water but be willing to buy whatever brand of bottled water the store has available. Therefore, marketing convenience products often limited to put the effort into getting the products available in as many places as possible. You may find it is very similar to impulse offerings, since they are both not planned ahead.
II. Shopping Offering
Different from convenience offerings, a shopping offering means consumers tend to make an effort to compare and select their favorite brands. Most of the time, they want and try to find the right products at the best prices. For instance, I buy a car recently and I have visited many websites of multiple car brands, try to the best car within my budget. Generally, consumers care about brands when they’re deciding on shopping brand-sensitive products. We probably do not care about the brand of bottled water, but when we plan to purchase a new car, brand names and their reputations are an important reference.
III. Specialty Offerings
After discussed shopping offerings that putting effort into it and convenience offerings, specialty offerings is a very different concept. Typically, specialty offerings are purchased less frequently than convenience offerings. They are highly differentiated offerings and available only through limited channels. For instance, a Lamborghini Huracán is likely to be far different feature-wise than the Toyota Corolla series. However, marketing specialty goods requires building brand name recognition and it is critical to show your customers your product’s key differences. Most of the time, marketers spend much money and effort to try to get consumers to perceive these specialties.
IV. Unsought Offerings
Unsought offerings are those that consumers do not generally want to have until they need them such as insurance claims or medicine. Marketing unsought products can be more difficult than the other offerings because unsought products consumers do not generally want to have. That means there is a strong wall of mind stand between you and your potential customers. Therefore, you must put much more effort to persuade them. To persuade them, companies' reputations, reviews, authorities, and consistency are all important factors that can influence customers' decisions. For instance, I tend to buy insurance policies from a reliable insurance institution.
Conclusion
The four types of consumer offerings help us better understand how to carefully marketing these different types of products. Some mistakes you don't want to make such as advertising your funeral services are trying to help people heading to heaven or professionally avoid your customers down to hell. Although ideally we always try to make good decisions, we are just some kind of animals and always make mistakes. We are not always trying to find the right products at the best prices all the time. For instance, if we do our online shopping at night, we probably tend to make our decisions more impulsively because we are falling asleep and tired.
Reference
Tanner, J. & Raymond, M.A. (2015). Principles of Marketing. University of Minnesota Open Textbook Library. Licensed under a Creative Commons by-nc-sa.
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