Service Marketing

Posted by Puja Walia Mann on May 18, 2010

Marketing is the flow of goods and services from the producer to consumer. It is based on relationship and value. In common parlance it is the distribution and sale of goods and services. Marketing can be differentiated as:
• Marketing of products
• Marketing of services.
Kotler & Bloom defined Services as “any activity or benefit that one party can offer to another that is essentially intangible and does not result in the ownership of anything. Its production may or may not be tied to a physical product.”
Then in 1990 Gronross proposed a working definition, according to him “a service is a an activity or series of activities of more or less intangible nature that normally, not necessarily, take place in interactions between the customer and the service employees and/ or physical resources or goods and/ or system of the service provider, which are provided as solution to customer problems.”
According to this definition:
• Services are by and large “activities” or they are series of activities rather than things.
• They take place in the interaction between the customer and the service provider, which means that services are produces and consumed simultaneously.
• Customer has a role to play in the production process as the services are provided in response to the problems of customers as solution.
Characteristics of a Service
There are five characteristics to a service which will be discussed below.
1. Lack of ownership.
You cannot own and store a service like you can a product. Services are used or hired for a period of time. For example when buying a ticket to the USA the service lasts maybe 9 hours each way , but consumers want and expect excellent service for that time. Because you can measure the duration of the service consumers become more demanding of it.
2. Intangibility
You cannot hold or touch a service unlike a product. In saying that although services are intangible the experience consumers obtain from the service has an impact on how they will perceive it. What do consumers perceive from customer service? the location, and the inner presentation of where they are purchasing the service?.
3. Inseparability
Services cannot be separated from the service providers. A product when produced can be taken away from the producer. However a service is produced at or near the point of purchase. Take visiting a restaurant, you order your meal, the waiting and delivery of the meal, the service provided by the waiter/ress is all apart of the service production process and is inseparable, the staff in a restaurant are as apart of the process as well as the quality of food provided.
4. Perishibility
Services last a specific time and cannot be stored like a product for later use. If travelling by train, coach or air the service will only last the duration of the journey. The service is developed and used almost simultaneously. Again because of this time constraint consumers demand more.
5. Heterogeneity
It is very difficult to make each service experience identical. If travelling by plane the service quality may differ from the first time you travelled by that airline to the second, because the airhostess is more or less experienced.
A concert performed by a group on two nights may differ in slight ways because it is very difficult to standardise every dance move. Generally systems and procedures are put into place to make sure the service provided is consistent all the time, training in service organisations is essential for this, however in saying this there will always be subtle differences.

CLASSIFICATION OF SERVICES
End-user
Services can be classified into the following categories:
Consumer: leisure, hairdressing, personal finance, package holidays.
Business to business: advertising agencies, printing, accountancy, consultancy. .
Industrial: plant maintenance and repair, work wear and hygiene, installation, project management.
Service tangibility
The degree of tangibility of a service can be used to classify services:
Highly tangible: car rental, vending machines, telecommunications.
Service linked to tangible goods: domestic appliance repair, car service.
Highly intangible: psychotherapy, consultancy, legal services.
People-based services
Services can be broken down into labour-intensive (people-based) and equipment-based services. This can also be represented by the degree of contact:
People-based services – high contact: education, dental care, restaurants, medical services.
.Equipment-based -low contact automatic car wash, launderette, vending machine, and cinema.
Expertise
The expertise and skills of the service provider can be broken down into the following categories:
Professional: medical services, legal services, accountancy, tutoring.
Non-professional: babysitting, care taking, casual labour.
Profit orientation
The overall business orientation is a recognized means of classification:
Not-for-profit: The Scouts Association, charities, public sector leisure facilities.
Commercial: banks, airlines, tour operators, hotel and catering services.
Services marketing is marketing based on relationship and value.
It may be used to market a service or a product.