What is a product by a company. The simplest example is a car that is made by the car company. The product is the car. But as the sales guys teach: their product is transportation. They offer the ability to travel from one place to another and the freedom that comes with it. So that is what the advertisement on TV tells you too.
But it is more than that …
The product for Facebook or social media companies is you. You are the one that is generating the content – you are the one that is consuming the content. They are just enablers. The product that they sell is your effort or your production.
Then there is the famous quote from the Tobacco trials. I quote “Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the minds of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy”
A product can also be a service. So the product of a house cleaning service is the service that they provide to give you the clean house.
The product also combines physical product and service. For example when you go to McDonalds, what they offer you is the physical product (the burger) but also the service of clean and convenient food at the time you want it and the ease of sitting in the car.
Also, now comes the product as a service. So with the Software as a service SaaS, the product is providing the service. The product is not available to you. It is just being rented to you to provide a service. There is some advantage to having a good product that keeps getting better and you have to do nothing because you are just getting a service.
And it keeps getting murkier. When you buy a watch, you buy that as a product. That product could be an ability to tell you time – so if you had a magical way to time being communicated to you (say speech), then the product that you are buying is that time keeping service. OK, so are you buying a watch or are you buying a service. OK given – the watch is not just time but is also an ability to look nice on your wrist.
If you keep thinking along those lines then the product concept keeps expanding…when you start a business, do you think in terms of the product in its complete version or do you still think a widget?