AMOCO Marketing Mix Strategies

A product is defined as anything offered for exchange to another person including physical objects, services, places, organizations, and ideas. Consumers typically recognize five distinctive product characteristicsquality level, features, styling, brand name, and packaging. Depending upon the type of product involvedphysical, service, and so forth, not all of these characteristics will be applicable in each instance. Brand name, and, as unlikely as it may seem, packaging are the most significant in the marketing of gasoline products. Oil companies, including AMOCO, attempt to make consumers believe that the gasoline products marketed by them are characterized by special levels of quality and by special features. In actuality, however, quality levels and features related to gasoline products in the United States are, essentially, aspects of the packaging process. What is important in this context is for an oil company's gasoline products to keep abreast of the

1 2level of technology applicable to product development in the industry. To stay abreast of industry technology, AMOCO conducts a balanced program of short, medium, and long range research (AMOCO celebrates . . ., 1989). Emphasis in this re