When talking about the product in marketing you do not only mean the core product. You mean the product and all the things associated with it. These are:
- The core or basic constituent
- Associated features
- The brand name
- The package
- The label
To understand how all the above stated things affect the product, consider the case of toilet soap. Toilet soap by itself is not a very glamorous product. However, companies rarely actually advertise the soap. They advertise the smell, the colorful packing, the oval shape, the feeling of freshness etc. associated with the soap.
Using all these features they make the soap very suited to appeal to their target audience. Using all these features they make their product stand out with respect to the rest of the products in the same category.
Using all these frills and making changes in the core product is called product management. Product management is done mainly for "positioning" the product or making the product stand out in the target customers mind. This brings us to a very important concept in the modern marketing environment called "positioning".