Instruments
Kotler identified four categories of products, classified in terms of long term benefits and immediate satisfaction :
- Deficient products, which bring neither long-run or short term benefits
- Pleasing products, which bring a high level of immediate satisfaction, but can cause harm to the society in the long run
- Salutary products, which bring low short term satisfaction, but benefit the society on the long run
- Desirable products, which combine long-run benefit and immediate satisfaction
Kotler’s concept of societal marketing suggested that for the well-being of society, the deficient products should be eliminated from the market, pleasing and salutary products should go through a product modification process to reach the fourth category, by incorporating missing short term benefits into salutary products and long term benefits into pleasing products, and the companies’ ultimate goal should be to develop desirable products.
This way, rather than focusing on selling a products, which can be good or bad for the consumers, the main focus is on consumer and society well-being.
Read more about this topic: Societal Marketing
Famous quotes containing the word instruments:
“Whilst Marx turned the Hegelian dialectic outwards, making it an instrument with which he could interpret the facts of history and so arrive at an objective science which insists on the translation of theory into action, Kierkegaard, on the other hand, turned the same instruments inwards, for the examination of his own soul or psychology, arriving at a subjective philosophy which involved him in the deepest pessimism and despair of action.”
—Sir Herbert Read (1893–1968)
“But when to mischiefmortals bend their will,
How soon they find fit instruments of ill!”
—Alexander Pope (1688–1744)
“We are all instruments endowed with feeling and memory. Our senses are so many strings that are struck by surrounding objects and that also frequently strike themselves.”
—Denis Diderot (1713–84)