A primer on the Whole Product Model

When I mentioned about the whole product concept on my article on product philosophy, I received a few enquiries about what the whole product concept was. In this post, I attempt to describe the concept in reasonable measure. I derive my knowledge of the concept from the marketing classic, Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore. However, the topic was first introduced to me by Prabhakar Gopalan, an accomplished product leader in our podcast interview.

The whole product concept is the most useful marketing constructs in high-tech products. The concept is very straightforward — there is a gap between the marketing promise made to the customer (the compelling value proposition) and the ability of the shipped product to fulfil that promise. For that gap to be overcome, the product must be augmented by variety of services and ancillary products to become the whole product.

The formal model as diagrammed has four different levels of whole product completeness:

1. Generic product: This is what is shipped in the box and what is covered by the purchasing contract.
2. Expected Product: This is the product that the consumer thought she was buying when she bought the generic product. It is the minimum configuration of products and services necessary to have any chance of achieving the buying objective. For example, when you buy a tablet, you need to have either a Wi-Fi network at home or a cellular connection for it to work, but either one is likely to have to be purchased separately.
3. Augmented Product: This is the product fleshed out to provide the maxim um chance of achieving the buying objective. In the case of a tablet, this would include email, a browser, a calendar, a personal directory, a search engine, and an app store, for example.
4. Potential Product:This represents the product’s room for growth as more and more ancillary products come on the market and as customer-specific enhancements to the system are made. The fact that for the Apple iPad there aresome 374,0900 apps on its App Store that I can buy to extend its reach and value is one of its key selling points.

Let’s understand this with another example.

The generic product for the Internet browser category would be the set of functions first made popular by Mosaic, then by Netscape Navigator, then by Internet Explorer, followed by Firefox and Chrome.

The expected product would include portability to each of the popular client platforms like iOS, Android and Windows.

The augmented product would include plugins from third parties to provide additional features.

The Whole Product and Technology Adoption Life Cycle

If we look at the technology adoption lifecycle as a whole, we can generalize that the outer circles of the whole product increase in importance as one moves from left to right.

That is the customers least in need of whole product support are technology enthusiasts. To cross into mainstream market, you have to first meet the demand of the pragmatic customers. These customers want the whole product to be readily available from the outset.

To read more on Whole Product Planning, refer to Geoffrey Moore’s book, Crossing the Chasm.