Adapting to Consumer Behaviour with Product Positioning and Value Addition – The FaceBook Case
Producers and marketers of products and services would be happy to know that they product offerings are addictive in nature and that their consumers find them irresistible – and keep coming back to them. There are marketers who yearn to get this reputation to their products that consumers may not be able to live without them. Unfortunately, most of these “Addictive” products are not legally recognized, such as contraband goods or tobacco. While tobacco doesn’t really come under the “illegal” category, many governments have effectively put stumbling blocks on the road to selling tobacco, with regulations on advertising and marketing of the products having been strictly enforced to discourage consumers from getting to those products.
Social networking sites wouldn’t be classified under the same league as tobacco by any stretch of imagination – but they seem to have a common thread that runs through them, as far as the nature of the products is concerned – social networking sites are definitely addictive for the school-going kids and teenagers, who have found this inimitable ability to stay in touch with their peers, fascinating. FaceBook, for one, has redefined the way teens interacted with each other. Now, the trend that has bordered on serious addiction is getting to see a change of fortunes, with teens increasingly seeing their responsibility towards studies being compromised with the enormous amount of time that they spend online.
Increasingly, teen users want to wean themselves of the social networking addiction to focus on what they are missing on, on account of the time they spend on Facebook – they are adapting different techniques and methods that would keep them restricted to a fixed schedule to log into their Facebook accounts. In effect, this would mean a new trend that could dent Facebook’s user base – and that would be the last thing that Facebook would want, just when all its plans have worked to perfection.
Value Addition in Facebook: Having such an enormous user-base that counts to almost 10 billion, all that Facebook has to do is to address this trend where students try to “De-addict” themselves from the social networking phenomenon. And this could be done if Facebook could offer its users more than what it offers right now – pure social networking. Facebook could incorporate in its product offering, perhaps, a proposition that would make students see reason to stay with Facebook, apart from the ability it offers to stay in touch with pals. If such a value addition could be introduced into the platform, perhaps in the form of knowledge-sharing, FaceBook could focus on expansion plans.
Not many other products that are addictive in nature could adapt their product offering to include value addition – social networking sites, which reside on the internet which is a wealth of information and knowledge, has the unique advantage of being able to do just that.
