Convenience rules our lives, and it also runs the grocery aisles. Roaming the grocery store shelves, we can find single-serve products, heat-and-go, microwavable, pre-packaged, instant, and a multitude of other easy-serve foods. Every shelf and aisle seems to be packed with new products competing to provide quick and easy foods. Even the old standby, soup, has a variety of choice for preparing products – dry, condensed, single-serving, home style, organic, and a few more.
But can soup be reinvented yet again? Campbell and Keurig think so and the latest product from Campbell Soup fits nicely into this trend, a single-serve K-Cup that can produce a cup of soup at the touch of a button. Starting next year, Keurig and Campbell will market a K-Cup of soup in three flavors. Using a standard Keurig brewer, the busy professional on the go can quickly prepare a meal in a cup, without the mess.
Group Activities and Discussion Questions:
- Start with a discussion of product life cycle. What types of products fit into each segment of the life cycle?
- Discuss the difficulties, and necessity, of taking a product from a mature stage and reinventing it for an earlier stage.
- Next, ask students to list all the different soups and packaging they can recall. What stage of the product life cycle are soups. Then, discuss the rise of the single-serve coffee makers.
- Show the Keurig Web site: http://www.keurig.com/
- Discuss the various products, along with the target markets for the products.
- Divide students into teams. Have each team take a product that is in the mature phase and redesign it to prolong its life.
Source: Brandchannel.com
