It
is not enough to know what to produce. The task of
marketing is rather more complex than it looks. It
is certainly not creating needs, but creating products
to suit implicit and explicit needs. A firm must understand
how to create smart products that supply a sort of
learning to consumers as they use them and meet their
needs to a level more than what they demanded, at
a particular time. For example, a consumer may demand
a battery for a clock or a torch. Now here, a simple
battery would work fine, but how about a battery that
indicates the usage level as you press the points
of indication to understand the consumption at a particular
point of time. So you develop an idea by using the
battery, about how much life the battery is left with.
This is a learning experience for both the consumers
as well as the companies producing such a product,
and hence, it can contemporarily be labeled as a smart
battery. Another example could be the television,
which adjusts its contrast, brightness and color of
the screen by itself with respect to the luminosity
of the room. Also, consider the headlights of a car,
which adjust automatically to become brighter in bad
weather or rainy conditions. Such products teach something
newto both the consumers and the companies creating
such products. This will also yield a significant
differentiation among products of same nature (for
e.g., simple battery vs. smart battery) in the given
industry, providing competitive advantage to the company
for being unique and producing an intelligent product.
Let us refer to such intelligent products as knowledge
products.
A
knowledge product, by definition, can be described
as a technology-enabled product, which has some sensor-based
technology or holds some sort of database in them.
This sensing (sensor) communicates (embedded codification
of knowledge which works on coding-decoding process
design) with the external world and adjusts itself
to the given condition under which the product operates
or the user wants them to operate. Consider for an
example, a thermostat, which automatically cuts off
the power supply once it reaches a certain temperature.
The product here adjusts automatically to the particular
temperature, which once set, need not be reset for
every use. Secondly, the thermostat automatically
cuts off the power after reaching that particular
temperature that prevents mishappening, which may
have caused otherwise. This explains the concept of
knowledge product in the sense thatfirstly, they help
the users in using the products without hassle; secondly,
they impart learning, as consumers become more techno
savvy and they go about reducing time on consumption
patterns; thirdly, it opens companies to new experiences
and technology-based expertise to tame the appetite
for sophisticated products that makes life easy and
fast; and, fourthly, this is how companies get smarter
with the development of knowledge products that involves
high technical soundness and establishes for its identity
among the firms of an industry. |
