Product Differentiation is a marketing strategy to distinguish a company’s product or services from the competition.
By Kottler and Keller, you can differentiate a product by form, features, quality, durability, reliability, repairability, style, and customization, to mention the most important. But also, you can differentiate by many other factors like how you can order it, delivery, installation, training, maintenance, repair, returns, and design.
Maybe 20 years ago, when not everybody had a fast Internet connection or online stores were not as popular as nowadays, when people need to buy a fan, they go from store to store and compare products. More sophisticated people buy a specialized magazine like the consumer report guide to evaluate one brand from another. You probably will buy a fan because your best friend told you it is a good brand and quality, but you didn’t have the tools we have these days.
If you need to buy a fan, you have many choices, you can go to the Home Depot, Lowes, or Amazon.com page, and they offer the option to compare one product from another in seconds.
You can obtain the price for each type of product, dimensions, electric consumption, horsepower, warranty, and even positive or negative reviews from other consumers who have already bought the product. These tools are at hand and provide consumers with the ability to make more effective decisions and intelligent purchases.
Brand awareness is a priority for marketers, and EV car manufacturers know it.
Brand awareness is a priority for marketers who want to gain market share or launch a new product or service.
Car manufacturers are battling to gain market share in the electric cars segment. On one side, we have Tesla with a long run in the market, but all the American, Asian, and European companies also want a piece of the cake.
Tesla is a little ahead of other brands, and unlike the other automakers, they sell the vehicles directly, so the distribution channel is shorter than their competitors. In addition, they offer unique features to their cars, like autopilot, supercharger stations, touch screens with gaming, streaming services, and many more features. You can read the whole list at BusinessInsider.com; Tesla has been differentiating their products from others by offering innovation, convenience, and an affordable product in its entry-level model. But to thestreet.com, this will change soon when Volkswagen overtakes Tesla’s electric car sales by 2024.
In the auto industry, like any other market, people are not only looking for pricing but also, like any other product, reliability, warranty, durability, quality, and corporate social responsibility.
Author: William G. Wolf
