Market orientation, i.e. producing specialty products for well-chosen customer groups, describes many business units within the Finnish forest industry. Therefore the product concept in these industries should include elements which are important for these special customer groups or customers. Except for the physical good, service and information affect on customers' idea of a product. In addition, it seems that ecological characteristics of products are increasingly emphasized in the forest industry. Therefore in this study the product concept was determined with physical, service, information and green, i.e. ecological, components. This product concept was applied in the products of the paper, paperboard and sawmill industries.
The main interest was to describe information as a product component and to develop measurement instruments for this component. Clarifying how much ecological factors are emphasized as a product component was also of interest. These aims required analysis of the relationships between all the different product components. The measurement instruments were developed based on iterative interviews of both researchers and experts working in the forest industry. The final interviews were based on semi-structured questionnaire. The interviewed experts were chosen by judgement and thus the results are indicative.
The results indicate that the combination of physical, service, information and green components forms a usable product concept within the industry sectors focused. The two developed measurement instruments for the information component provided fairly similar logical results. Thus it seems that within an industry sector, the relative differences in the information content of products can be measured. Information included in products was indicated to be used more strongly in marketing in the paper and paperboard industries than in the sawmill industry. The physical product component was seen as the relatively strongest and the green component as the weakest of the four product components. However, the green component was indicated to be included in most of the products within the industry sectors analyzed.
Key words: product concept, information component, green component.
Correspondence: Ritva Toivonen, University of Helsinki, Department of Forest Economics, P.O. Box 24 (Unioninkatu 40 B), FIN-00014 Helsingin yliopisto, Finland
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