Prodvices and servducts

It's happening all around you.

Products and services are merging. Buyers sell and sellers buy. What used to be neat value chains are messy connected economic webs. Homes are offices.

And if you're a business marketer caught in the middle of these basic market shifts you're probably as flustered as Les Nessman reporting from the MTV Malibu beach house.

Age of the hybrid, the halfbreed and the bastard child
On every front opposites are attracting and their offspring are unsettling mutants.

As a result, the old approaches to selling and communicating them aren't just dying, they've already been cremated and Woody Harrelson is smoking their ashes in his lucky skull bong. New paradigms are redefining our businesses, what we communicate, how we communicate it, when we communicate it and whom we communicate it to.

How could this happen to you
It's happening in three fundamental ways.

First, almost instantaneous communications and computers are shrinking time and focusing all business transactions on speed.

Second, connectivity is putting everyone and everything online with each other in one way or another. In fact, we're so intertwined we make a Twister game between the casts of Cirque du Soleil and the Acrobats of China look like a Busby Berkley chorus line. Today, we're so connected that distance is no longer much of a factor in anything. Let alone business.

And third, intangible value of all kinds, like service, information and emotion are growing so fast they're reducing the importance of tangible mass. Meaning the physical product itself is becoming less important than the ancillary things it makes possible through its intangible benefits. (If you want to know what we just said, check out "Value shift.")

Speedy, connected mutants everywhere
Speed is driving products and services to resemble each other in a lot of different ways. For one, product lifecycles are now shorter than the attention span of the guy from "Shine" hooked up to a Jolt Cola IV. In turn, rapid obsolescence demands continual upgrading or replacement.

So now there's no such thing as selling a static product to a customer and then forgetting about them. The people who are your customers today will be your customers again in six months—or in six minutes. And if not, then they'll be someone else's.

The point is, when you're dealing with the same customers over continually upgraded, changed and customized products you begin to qualify as a service business.

The need for speed is also causing a lot of people in the service business to feel like they're selling products. That's because everybody wants their services fast. Whether it's a burger or a branding program it has to happen quickly. Quicker. Faster. More quickly. Quickest.

Under this kind of time pressure, there's no way services can be totally tailored to each and every customer. So even when they're customized, at their core they still have to be standardized, modularized, packaged and embedded in software. In other words, they start looking a lot more like products.

Everybody's hooking up
Chiefly, though, products and services are merging because of connectivity. Not only the connectivity of all users and possible users to each other, but the connectivity of users directly to makers, the connectivity of users and possible users and makers to an Internet environment of perfect information, and the connectivity of product/services that link electronically to information bases.

That's a lot of connecting going on out there.

And it creates a lot of opportunities for service. It's just crazy. One day you're playing Pong, the next thing you know, Wes, the gas meter guy with the eye patch, has an uplink to a satellite on his tool belt.

Connectivity means that customers will maintain ever-closer links to the creators and marketers of the goods they use. And as a result, the product is becoming simply a service waiting to happen. And the service is simply the product in action.

No product, no service, no comprendo
Kind of confusing isn't it?

That's because in this new world, it doesn't make sense to think of things in terms of products or services any more. Especially when it comes to marketing and brand communications.

Instead you should be communicating the benefits of product-service hybrids. What we will ingeniously call value offers.

Essentially value offers are "productized" services and "servicized" products.

Value offers are solutions to customer problems without the distinction of product or service labels because the solution becomes so paramount that you can no longer tell what part of it is product and what part is service. They become interdependent.

Wake up and smell the value offers
And if you don't think this is beginning to happen to you, right now, in your market, check it out. You may be more out of it than Strom Thurmond on a little brown jug of Nyquil.

And you can't afford to be.

Because in this new environment, companies that knowingly (or worse, unknowingly) communicate and brand themselves as if they are selling unsupported, unconnected products will be viewed as no better than snake oil salesmen. And firms that communicate unpackaged and unleveraged services will be perceived to be concerned only with running up their billable hours and unconcerned about fulfilling the customer's desires.

Beyond bundling
The successful design and communication of value offers requires a new kind of thinking. You have to start thinking simultaneously not only about what it is and what it does but, most importantly, what it enables to happen.

That goes way beyond bundling products and services, Bucky. Bundling is a step in the right direction because it recognizes that businesses buy product/services because they have needs that only these things together help to fill. But ultimately bundling isn't enough.

It's not enough to just toss together a bunch of complementary goods and services, and stick a brand and price tag on them. The real value comes when these things are blended so they can't be separated and can't exist independently of each other.

You're in the mutant business
If you think you're in a product business or a service business, think again. To survive in paradigm-shifting markets you must be in both. Simultaneously.

For business marketers and communicators, that means you have to change your mindset about the very nature of what you're branding and what you're communicating.

You need to wrap existing products in intangibles like service, information and emotion and make services tangible by making them real, physical, touchable and branded.

A new mindset

If you'd like to see how you can take advantage of this paradigm shift in how value offers can be communicated, go to "Five ways."

And if you'd like to know more about a business branding system that begins by defining and continues by communicating offers that customers and prospects truly value, click on "Increase your brandwidth."