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Service
- Services: are acts, efforts, or performances exchanged from producer to user without ownership rights
- Satisfies needs by providing pleasure, information, or convenience
- Often more cost effective for organizations to hire outside firms that specialize in these services than to hire a workforce and handle the tasks themselves
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Characteristics of Services
- Intangibility
- Perishability
- Variability
- Inseparability
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Intangibility
- Customers can’t see, touch, or smell good service
- Customers look for reassuring signs before they purchase so marketers must ensure that these signs are readily available
- Providing physical cues to reassure the buyer
- “look” of the facility, its furnishing, logo, stationary, business cards, the appearance of its employees, or well designed advertising and Web sites
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Perishability
- the characteristic of a service that makes it impossible to store for later sale or consumption (case of use it or lose it)
- Marketers try to avoid these problems when they use the marketing mix to encourage demand for the service during slack times
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Perishability
Capacity management:
- process by which organizations adjust their services in an attempt to match supply with demand
- Adjusting the product or price
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Variability
- Over time even the same service the same individual performs for the same customer changes
- Difficult to standardize services because service providers and customers vary
- Don’t want standardization when we purchase a service
- Customers often appreciate the one that customizes its service for each individual
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Inseparability
- it is impossible to separate the production of a service from the consumption of that service
- Service encounter: interaction between the customer and the service provider
- Distermediation: eliminating the interaction between customers and salespeople so as to minimize negative service encounters and reduce costs (ex: self-service gas pumps)
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Goods-Dominated Products
Services may be even more important for marketers of business-to-business tangibles
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Equipment or Facility Based Service
- --Mixture of tangible and intangible elements
- --Operational factors: clear signs and other guidelines must show customers how to use the service
- --Minimize waiting times
- --Locational factors: make sure their services sites are convenient and in neighborhoods that are attractive to prospective customers
- --Environmental Factors: operate a storefront service that requires people to come to their location realize they must create an attractive environmental to lure customers
- --Create a pleasant environment as part of their
- marketing strategy
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People Based Services
- Intangible end of the continuum are people based
- People have less and less time to get things done, the importance of people based services increase
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