The Marketing of Information in the Information Age

The long-standing distinction made between goods and services must now be joined by the distinction between these two categories and “information products.” The authors propose that marketing management, practice, and theory could benefit by broadening the scope of what marketers market by adding a third category besides tangible goods and intangible services. It is apparent that information is an unusual and fundamental physical and logical phenomenon from either of these. From this the authors propose that information products differ from both tangible goods and perishable services in that information products have three properties derived from their fundamental abstractness: they are scalable, mutable, and public. Moreover, an increasing number of goods and services now contain information as a distinct but integral element in the way they deliver benefits. Thus, the authors propose that marketing theory should revise the concept of “product” to explicitly include an informational component and that the implications of this revised concept be discussed. This paper presents some thoughts on the issues such discussions should address, focusing on strategic management implications for marketing information products in the information age.