Product Range Management

A product range is the total product offering expressed in terms of width and depth. The width of a product range depends on the variety or number of types in a product category. The depth of a product range refers to the amount of choice offered in terms of product and brand variation within a product category.  A product range with a lot of depth allows you to cover a range of price points. Similarly, the width allows providing a great variety and choices to the consumer with line extensions.

Brand Extension: The brand Rasna extended into another category like packaged juices.

Line Extension: The brand Maggi launched new flavours of Maggi. Here Maggi is still in the same category, but the variation comes within the offering. Line extensions are not necessarily in flavours, but happen in any of the product attributes.

Grammage Range Extension: When Surf Excel extends its Grammage range. Earlier it used to launch 50 gm and 100gm, and now it launched a 20gm and 250gm. Also, remember most Grammage extensions are considered as line extension.

How promotions help?

For example, let us suppose there is a biscuit company XYZ in India which is a very big brand. XYZ currently offers its packs in 90 and 150 gm packs. The challenge it faces in North India is from local competition. There are a few strong local players who offer more volumes at low price points. The local companies offer very large pack sizes and doing very well. The consumer behaviour in the North India shows that people tend to buy large packs, and generally don’t prefer to buy small packs.

Challenge1: The Company XYZ doesn’t have production capacity for large packs.

Challenge2: It is very difficult to create trials when consumers tend to buy large packs.

So, the company decides to have a two-pronged approach:

1. Give a rider promo (give your small pack biscuit free with another category) to induce trials.
2. Introduce large combo-packs to attract the large-pack buyers

To give a rider-promo, is to give a product with another popular product based on the target consumers you want to reach. Marketers ask the question: Which is the product in my existing portfolio that reaches the maximum target group of the new biscuit product? This will help them leverage the existing distribution. If there is no product that is present in your existing portfolio then you may negotiate with other companies who operate in similar categories.  Though there are other considerations, leveraging the distribution is one of the most crucial factors in a promotion, if the intention of the promotion is to induce trials. Because one of the most important factors to create trials is that the product should be present in the stores.