Commoditization
Under commoditization is in the economy , a trend meant in which products or services to differentiate and lose of customers as interchangeable as commodities are perceived.
Starting point commodities
Originally the Anglicism referred to commodities only raw materials , i.e. simply structured and qualitatively almost constant commodities . Their standardization and fungibility made them commodities that are mutually exchangeable and therefore cannot be traded on presence markets but on exchanges ( commodity exchanges ).
trend
However, the content of the term commodities seems to change over time. It is questionable whether only raw materials can still be equated with the English commodity , especially since the advancing commoditization assigns more and more goods the status of commodities. In addition to raw materials, electricity or even microchips are now among the commodities. In view of the complexity of microchips, however, it makes more sense to assign them to standardized mass products . The transition from a luxury good to a mass product or the change from a special service to a (free) standard service is also called commoditization. Some authors speak of a “commoditization of the markets” when former product innovations (or financial innovations ) such as MP3 players or cell phones have reached the status of market maturity and no longer contain any significant innovations . In the financial sector, commoditization is advancing and is expressed in the simplification of products that previously required explanations. The standardization of financial services makes them comparable and is also known as the commoditization of financial products .
De-commoditization
Linguistically, the prefix “de-” stands for “ent-” and means something like “away from commoditization”. De-commoditization involves differentiation, specialization or individualization of products and services. Linguistically, the term assumes that a commoditization has taken place beforehand. However, the application of the term is inconsistent in the specialist literature . On the one hand, it is mostly understood to mean the strengthening of unique selling points to reduce the perceived interchangeability of commodities, on the other hand, in order to regain competitive strength, companies should rely on the differentiation of products with objectively existing differentiation potentials. The latter source understands de-commoditization as a process to create or restore the distinctiveness of products.
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Christian Tietje / Horst-Peter Götting / Urs Peter Gruber / Jörn Lüdemann u. a. (Ed.), Internationales Wirtschaftsrecht , 2015, p. 298
- ↑ Arnd Albrecht, International Management , 2016, p. 30
- ↑ Sebastian Klinski / Sabine Haller, The invisible hand in the company , 2005, p. 22
- ↑ Werner Pepels, Sales Manager Handbook , 2014, p. 205
- ↑ Thomas Hutzschenreuter, Electronic Competition: Branch dynamics through Entrepreneurship on the Internet , 2000, p. 144
- ^ Clayton M. Christensen, Michael E. Raynor, Jeff Dyer, Hal Gregersen: The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail . 1997.
- ^ Margit Enke, Anja Geigenmüller, Alexander Leischnig (eds.): Commodity Marketing . Springer Gabler, 2014. Here p. 288.
- ^ Manfred Bruhn, Karsten Hadwich: Service transformation . 2016. Here p. 128.