Four Methods of Obtaining Products: From Self-Sufficiency to Exchange

There are four main ways people can obtain products. The first is self-production, where individuals meet their own needs without outside help, such as through hunting or gathering food. This method is common in early human societies and still exists in some rural or isolated areas, without involving markets or interactions with others.

The second method is coercion, where people take or steal from others by force or intimidation. This unethical approach undermines social stability and trust and is associated with criminal behavior. Coercion does not offer a sustainable or cooperative way of meeting needs.

The third method is begging, where individuals rely on the charity and goodwill of others, offering only gratitude in return. While begging can provide immediate help, it does not address long-term needs and is often seen in unequal societies where some people struggle to support themselves.

The fourth and most sustainable method is exchange, where individuals trade resources or services in a mutually beneficial transaction. Exchange forms the foundation of market economies and fosters cooperation, innovation, and economic growth. Marketing comes into play when people seek to satisfy needs through exchange, promoting and facilitating these transactions.

In conclusion, while self-production, coercion, and begging are ways to meet needs, exchange is the most ethical and sustainable method, driving modern economies and complex markets.
Four Methods of Obtaining Products: From Self-Sufficiency to Exchange

Multiproduct firm

A multiproduct firm is a firm that deals, by definition, with more than one output market, in one or more time periods. This leads, naturally, to a richer set of market –based arrangement.

Multiproduct firms must take strategic decisions at the corporate, business, marketing and sales levels. Business strategy decisions determine how each business unit plans to compete effectively within its industry.

Diversification may deliver a multiproduct company some advantages compared to specialists. For example, a conglomerate may cross-subsidies some activities at the expense of other activities.

Mutual forbearance indicates that multiproduct firms do recognized that their own products have to compete with other multiproduct firms on several markets. When they see this is the case, they may be inclined to compete less severely with other multiproduct firms and some form of oligopoly may rise.

Products in the multiproduct firm are often interrelated. Some products may be purchased by a common set of customer: alternatively, other products may share common production or other resources (e.g., these products may be sold through a common sales force).
Multiproduct firm

Marketers and Prospects

Marketers and Prospects
The concepts of markets bring us full circle to the concept of marketing. Marketing means working with market to actualize potential exchanges for the purpose of satisfying human needs and wants.

If one party is more actively seeking an exchange than the other party, we call the first party a marketer and the second party a prospect. A marketer is someone whom the marketer identifies as potentially willing and able to engage in an exchange of values. The marketer can be a seller or a buyer, suppose several persons want to buy an attractive house that has just become available. Each prospective buyer will try to market himself or herself to the seller. Those buyers are doing the marketing. In the event that both parties actively seek an exchange, we say that both of them are marketers and call the situation one of ‘reciprocal marketing’.

In the normal situation, the marketer is a company serving a market of end users in the face of competitors. The company and the competitors send their respective products and messages directly and/or through marketing intermediaries to end users. Their relative effectiveness is influenced by their respective suppliers as well as major environmental forces.

In this case, marketing can be defined as a social and managerial process by which individual and groups obtain what they need and want through creating and exchanging products of value with others.
Marketers and Prospects

Value, Cost and Satisfaction

Value, Cost and Satisfaction
How do consumers choose among the many products that might satisfy a given need? Suppose one person needs a travel five kilometers to work each day. A number of products could satisfy this need: roller blades, a bicycle, a motorcycle, an automobile, a taxicab and a bus. These alternate constitute his product choice set. Assume that he would like to satisfy several additional needs in traveling to work, namely speed, safety, ease and economy. We can call these his need set. Now each product has a different capacity to satisfy his various needs. Thus a bicycle will be slower, less safe, and more effortful than an automobile, but it will be more economical. Somehow he has to decide which product will deliver the most satisfaction.

The guiding concepts here are value and satisfaction. Value is the consumer’s estimate of the parodist’s overall capacity to satisfy his needs. Suppose he is primarily interested in the speed and ease of getting to work. If he were offered any of these products at no cost we would predict that he would choose the automobile. However, since each product involved a cost, he will no necessarily choose the car, which cost substantially more than a bicycle. He will have to give up of other things to obtain the car. Therefore, he will consider the products value and price before making a choice. He will choose the product that will produce the most value per dollar. He will form an estimate of the capacity of each product to satisfy his set of needs. He might rank the products from the most need-satisfying to the least.
Value, Cost and Satisfaction

What is product?

What is product?
People satisfy their needs and want their products. A product is anything that can be offered to satisfy a need or want. Occasionally we will use other terms for product such as offering or solution.

The importance of physical products lies not so much in owning them as in obtaining the services they rendered. We buy a car because it suppliers transportation service. We buy a microwave oven because it supplies a cooking service. Thus physical products are really vehicles that deliver service too.

In fact, services are also supplied by other vehicles, such as persons, places activities organizations, and ideas. If we are bored, we can attend a concert and listen to a singer: travel to a beach resort: sing our hearts out a karaoke lounge; join a golf club; or adopt a different philosophy about life.

Manufacturers often making mistake of paying more attention to their physical products than to the services produced by these products. They see themselves as selling a product rather than providing a solution to a need. Yet a woman is not buying lipstick; she is buying “hope”. A carpenter is not buying a drill; he is buying a “hole”.

A physical object is a means of packaging a service. The marketer’s job is to sell the benefits or services built into physical products rather than just describe their physical features. Sellers who concentrate their thinking on physical product instead of the consumer’s need are said to suffer from marketing myopia.
What is product?