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:
“I lay my eternal curse on whomsoever shall now or at any time hereafter make schoolbooks of my works and make me hated as Shakespeare is hated. My plays were not designed as instruments of torture. All the schools that lust after them get this answer, and will never get any other.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“I rejoice that America has resisted. Three millions of people, so dead to all the feelings of liberty, as voluntarily to submit to be slaves, would have been fit instruments to make slaves of the rest.”
—William Pitt, The Elder, Lord Chatham (1708–1778)
“Fashionable women regard themselves, and are regarded by men, as pretty toys or as mere instruments of pleasure; and the vacuity of mind, the heartlessness, the frivolity which is the necessary result of this false and debasing estimate of women, can only be fully understood by those who have mingled in the folly and wickedness of fashionable life ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)