The
issue of marketing conver-gence has been gaining mo-mentum
in recent times. Marketers have started using various dimensions
of convergence to get to the customers as well as serve them
better. An important part of convergence marketing is product
convergence. Product convergence, in simple terms, means the
combination of different products which satisfy different
consumer needs in a single unit. For example, the camera phone
serves the purpose of being a tool of communication as well
as a camera. Convergence marketing has been helped greatly
by the advent of internet technology. Also with the technology
diffusion process becoming faster day by day, marketers are
trying to gain advantage through convergence marketing. Though
product convergence can be traced back to the 1960s, where
there were products such as the "auto-boat" (a convergence
of an automobile and a boat) or "aero-car" (a convergence
of an automobile and an aeroplane), the products then received
very poor response. The basic reason was that the products
which were converged served highly divergent purposes. However,
in the new millennium we have seen many successful convergence
products such as the PALM, which is a convergence of a mobile
phone and a PDA .
The
term "convergence" was first coined by the noted
scholars CK Prahalad and Gary Hamel back in 1990. They opined
that companies need to put together disparate or separate
products and services to come up with new market-offerings
to satisfy the needs of the consumers. However, it is very
difficult to find out a proper definition of the term "convergence". |
