GB530 Unit 6 Product Strategy Example

The Report Is the Product: A Unit 6 Product Strategy for a Night-Flying Roof Survey Firm

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

GB530: Marketing Management

Unit 6 Product Strategy

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The firm, its services and every figure are composite and illustrative; the sources cited are real.

The Service

Scioto Thermal Imaging's service takes place mostly out of sight. Crews fly after sunset, when the owner's staff have gone home. Analysts process thermal images the next day. A partner roofer cuts a few verification cores. Then a report arrives. Levitt (1972) argued that services can be designed and managed with the discipline of a production line, and for a service like this one, the design must also decide what the customer sees.

Exhibit 1: The Service Blueprint

A service blueprint, as Bitner et al. (2008) set it out, charts every step the customer goes through and separates customer actions, visible employee actions, invisible employee actions and support processes, with a line of visibility dividing what the customer sees from what they do not.

Customer actions: request a survey; grant roof access; meet the core verification crew, if present; receive and read the report; act on it.

Visible to the customer, above the line of visibility: the request confirmation and scheduling call; the core verification visit, which takes about an hour on the roof; the report and, for program customers, a review call.

Invisible to the customer, below the line: weather checks and crew scheduling; the night flight, about three to five hours on a large roof; image processing and analysis; marking core locations; quality review of the report.

Support processes: pilot training and certification, camera calibration, data storage, the partner roofer agreement and billing.

Three moments reach the customer: the request, the core visit and the report. Of those, the report is the one the customer keeps, shares with insurers and lenders, and uses to decide what to spend.

Everything the firm is proud of happens below the line of visibility, so the customer judges the whole service by the one document that crosses it.

What the Report Must Do

The buyer research in Unit 3 found that asset managers approve spending and use roof evidence with insurers and lenders. The report must therefore serve someone who did not order the flight and may never visit the building. Four requirements follow:

A one-page summary stating the wet area in square feet and as a share of the roof, the estimated repair cost and whether the roof is a candidate for repair or replacement.

A map that marks wet areas clearly on an aerial image, with core results beside each verification point.

Consistency across buildings, so an asset manager comparing twenty roofs can read every report the same way.

A statement of independence, confirming that the firm does not perform or refer roof repairs, which supports the positioning set out in Unit 5.

Exhibit 2: The Product Line

1. The one-time thermal survey. A single night flight, analysis, three to five verification cores and a report. Price about 3.2 cents a square foot. Customers: owners with a known problem, buyers of a building and insurers requesting evidence.

2. The annual roof program. For portfolio owners: a spring survey of every enrolled roof, a fall re-flight of roofs with flagged areas, leak-response flights within 48 hours, a portfolio dashboard comparing roofs, and a letter each year summarizing condition for insurers. Price about 4.2 cents a square foot a year.

3. The contractor lead report, to be retired. Today the firm sells roofing contractors a white-label report they use to propose replacements. It provides about 61 percent of survey volume but contradicts the firm's independent position. It should be phased out over two years, with no new contractor contracts after the first quarter.

Kotler and Keller (2016) describe product line decisions as choices about which items to add, keep or drop given the firm's strategy. Here the strategy decides the line: anything that undermines independence goes, even if it sells.

Why the Annual Program Leads

The program turns a reactive purchase, made when a roof leaks, into a planned one made each year. For the owner, it gives a record of roof condition over time, which insurers and lenders value, and catches moisture while repairs are small. For the firm, it creates recurring revenue, allows crews to be scheduled across the season rather than in response to leaks, and builds the portfolio relationships the Unit 4 targeting analysis identified.

The program's elements are chosen from the blueprint. The dashboard and annual letter extend what crosses the line of visibility, giving the customer more ways to see value. Leak-response flights make the firm the facility manager's first call, which the buyer research found was the contractor's role today.

Retiring the Contractor Report

Retiring a product that brings most of the volume is the hardest decision in the strategy. In composite figures, contractor reports brought about $1.5 million of revenue last year. A two-year phase-out lets owner revenue grow while contractor revenue declines: no new contractor accounts from the first quarter, existing contracts allowed to run out, and contractor customers offered the standard one-time survey with the independence statement included, which most will decline. The firm accepts slower growth in exchange for a position competitors cannot easily claim.

Pricing the Line Together

The two remaining products must be priced so that owners move toward the program. A portfolio owner with ten 160,000-square-foot buildings would pay about $51,200 for one-time surveys of all ten, or about $67,700 a year for the program, which adds a fall re-flight, leak response, the dashboard and the insurer letter. The difference of about $16,500 a year buys continuous coverage. The pricing analysis in Unit 7 tests whether that difference is justified by value.

Quality Standards

Because the report is what the customer judges, quality standards focus on it. Every report should be reviewed by a second analyst before delivery; core results should match the thermal readings at least 90 percent of the time; and reports should reach customers within four working days of the flight. The firm should track these measures monthly.

Risks

The main risk is that owners do not adopt the program fast enough to replace contractor revenue. A second is weather: a wet spring could delay surveys across the program and strain the four-day standard. A third is that the dashboard and reports take more analyst time than planned, raising costs.

Conclusion

For the owner, what the firm sells is a report and the decisions it makes possible. Rebuilding the line around that report, leading with an annual program and retiring the contractor product, aligns what the firm sells with the independence it claims.

References

Bitner, M. J., Ostrom, A. L., & Morgan, F. N. (2008). Service blueprinting: A practical technique for service innovation. California Management Review, 50(3), 66-94. https://doi.org/10.2307/41166446

Kotler, P., & Keller, K. L. (2016). Marketing management (15th ed.). Pearson.

Levitt, T. (1972). Production-line approach to service. Harvard Business Review, 50(5), 41-52.