Chapter 11 - Developing and Managing Products

Revisions of Products

   New products are essential to keep up with the market, and to maximize profits as a company in this fast paced digital era. As many other tech companies, Motorola follows the strategy of introducing flagship mobile devices every year. This trend was started back in 1996, they released the breakthrough mobile phone "StarTAC". They had a good few years after the release of the phone, but the competition was able to come up with more value added features which poised them to replace their flagship device  after 4 year to keep up with the competition. Today's mobile phone market is fiercely competitive. It is simply not adequate for a mobile phone company to replace their previous product every 4 years since the technology is evolving at a fast pace. Therefore, it has become a necessity for smartphone manufacturers to come up with a successor every year for their last year's smartphone, and Motorola has already confirmed their plans on refreshing their mobile line up this year. These new products that serves to replace the previous product are called revisions of the existing product. 

New Product Lines & Research and Development

   Fittingly to this discussion, they are about to enter a whole new product line this year with the announcement of Moto 360. It has already created a buzz in the tech community, but Motorola aims to reach the regular consumer with an ergonomic design that mimics the traditional timepiece. It's design departures from the geeky square design which is followed by other smatwatch manufacturers. These design changes were made by Motorola's research & development team that has conducted thorough research, and brainstorming to make significant changes for its new products in order to make it unique in the market.

Moto 360

Samsung Smarwatches

A different design approach to smartwatch

Four Stages of Product Life Cycle.

Motorola's breakthrough product, StarTAC is a product that went through the four stages of product life cycle. It was introduced in 1996, it was in the center attention. It caught the eye of many businessmen, since it was portable & well designed compared to its previous edition, MicroTAC. This stage was the introductory stage of the StarTAC. Sales were growing steadily with the hype of the new mobile phone as it entered in to the growth stage. Motorola reported that it sold more than 40 million units in 1999, and the European phone manufacturers, such as Nokia, Ericsson started to introduce their products to the market to compete with Motorola. By the end of year 200 sales reached 60 million units, but the rate of sales were decreasing compared to what it was two year ago. Therefore, it was the reaching the climax of its maturity stage. Predictability, the steady ship was startled by the European tech giants inventions. Moreover, several technical issues with the device drove away the new customers. By the end of 2000 it was struggling in the market, and the sales were decreasing rapidly which means it entered in to the decline stage of the life cycle. In  2001, Motorola discontinued the product as they came up with a new iterations of the StarTAC.


   Currently, the Moto X is reaching its decline stage, while the inexpensive model Moto G is in the growth stage after 6 months of its launch. Moto X has been struggling to compete with the big guns since launch, and the sales figures were continuously dropping to this day according to Wall Street Journal. On the other hand, reception for Moto G has been overwhelming, and because of this demand, it also went out of stock in countries like India, Brazil & United Kingdom. Therefore, Moto G clearly belongs to the growth stage while the troubled Moto X is in the decline stage.

Chapter 12 - Services and Nonprofit Organization Marketing

   Even though Motorola is a product oriented company, they still have to provide services to ensure customer satisfaction after purchase. For example, it provides free phone consultation, and online chat service for its customers' to help them to navigate, or troubleshoot in an emergency. Moreover, it has several repair centers in major cities to provide after purchase repairs for the their products. 

   These few services I mentioned above are all intangible. They cannot be felt or touched as their products. Also, these services are heterogeneous. For example, the repair centers of Motorola could take different amount of time to repair the mobile phones from center to center, since it depends on the skills of the assigned engineers and technicians. Therefore, from center to center the quality and the rapidity of service could vary. Same goes for their customer service. 

Service Quality

   Service quality can make or break a company's reputation regardless of their orientation. With the ease of access to internet, consumers have the ability to get valuable information about services provided by certain companies. Therefore, companies have to provide a reliable service for the customers. In fact, is the utmost important aspect of service quality. For instance, if you were to call Motorola's customer care to claim the warranty for a damaged phone, (assuming that the damage has been covered by the warranty) you would not expect to have an argument with a representative to prove your eligibility. In other words, it should be accurate to the written warranty, and the process should be effortless to the customer. 

   Moreover, responsiveness is a key component in service quality. In the example above, if you were put on hold for 15-20 minutes because of the representative's incompetency, it would definitely irritate you as the customer, and it could lead you to give him/her a negative feedback. In the worst case scenario, they could lose you as a customer out of frustration. Therefore, response time is an important aspect in service quality. To counter those issues, companies like Motorola educate their customer service representatives about products, as well as issues that are related to them.

Chapter 10 - Product Concepts

   Motorola mobility is a company that offers consumer products worldwide. Their products serves to satisfy individual wants of the customers. If you analyze Motorola's product mix, it is clearly confined compared to companies, such as Apple, and Samsung. Those companies have a wide variety of products such as, smartphones, notebooks, MacBooks, Television sets, and DVD/Blu Ray players. Motorola mainly emphasizes on mobile phones, and accessories that works along with their products: hence the width of the product mix is considerably short. 

Brand

   When you hear the name Motorola you would recall that world renowned "M" symbol in your mind. As a prestige American company, Motorola has been able to establish their brand name, and the brand logo as a leading figure in the mobile phone industry. It could be one of the reasons why Lenovo opted to keep the Motorola name, and the logo for the company even after the acquisition, because the Motorola brand has a high awareness among the consumers.

All throughout the years, the iconic "M" hasn't left its brand logo

Product Modification

  Motorola has utilized functional modification in their products to present a better user experience for their consumers. Even though, their products were based on Android operating system,  in the beginning they used a completely different user interface that was created with hopes of making it appealing. However, they failed in that regard, since the user interface of their Android devices were full of lag, and it demanded a lot of system memory which made the phones unusable at times. Therefore, they decided to make a huge overhaul with their new devices by removing the UI completely, and using Google's authentic user interface with some added features. It worked in their favor, since they have been getting good feedback about their new overhaul to the user interface. Conversely, Apple decided to stick to their conventional user interface with iOS 7, because the early iterations has been praised by many consumers in the past. Even though, they did some minor tweaks to the exterior looks, it operates similarly to the old versions of iOS. They followed the old adage "if it ain't broke, don't fix it", and it proves that product modification is something that has to be done after extensive research.

Apple's controlled approach to their operating system