WTGR

What are the driving forces causing companies to seek new and weird ways to change the product so they can keep selling more?

1. The intensity of competition - the Competitive Environment,  - in a globalized community of businesses all interlinked, it becomes easier and easier to copy other people's products, especially consumer electronics
- so once you have launched a new product - there is a very short time before someone else will make a knock-off copy, or even make a slight improvement to capture your customers

2. The continued advances in technology, the Technological Environment. Technology makes it easier and easier to copy other products. Also, advanced in technology make it more possible to have to features to add on to a product that is several months old

3. The Economic Environment - the need for companies to make more money selling a product (maybe because the cycle was too short) - 

4. The Social / Cultural Environment - after the product has been used by the early adopters, it might the possible that other customer groups have slightly different uses, and this can be accomodated if the product packaging or features are altered slightly to make it more appealing to other demographics.

WTGR

The ad to the left demonstrates a clear example of product modification by showing how the cell phone screen has been modified to show the screen horizontally.

The cute ad demonstrates why this makes sense because many other things in everyday life are horizontally oriented, not vertically.