What is service marketing?

I think of service marketing as the marketing of a service rather than a product. Some marketing experts use the terms “tangible” and “intangible,” but I don’t see the point. Services are intangible, and products are tangible. But other characteristics affect services marketing as much as tangibility.

So what is service marketing and why does it matter? Isn’t marketing basically the same for products and services? Well, yes and no.

What Is Service Marketing Compared To Product Marketing?

Most marketing principles, strategies and tactics work equally well for products or services. Both need a marketing plan. Both need marketing goals and objectives. Both need strategies to meet the goals and tactics to meet the objectives.

What Is Service Marketing Contrasted To Product Marketing?

However, services differ from products in some ways that make service marketing different. According to learnmarketing.net, five characteristics of services cause service marketing to differ from product marketing:

• Lack of ownership – Services are hired for a specific time period. They are not owned.
• Intangibility – Services cannot be held or touched like a product can.
• Inseparability – Services are linked and inseparable from service providers.
• Perishibility – Services last for a specific period and cannot be stored.
• Inconsistency – Services are never exactly the same one time to the next.

Because of these differences between services and products, service marketing requires an additional three p’s from the four used for products. These additional p’s for service marketing are:

• People – Because services are inseparable from the people providing the service, talented employees are vital to marketing and business success.
• Process – The process or system that delivers the service determines how good the quality is perceived and offer marketing opportunities.
• Physical evidence – Because services are intangible, physical evidence is necessary to enable customers to judge the quality of the service.

What Is Service Marketing’s Best Strategies and Tactics?

Service marketing requires some special strategies and tactics that relate to how services differ from products.

For example, service marketing requires promotions that help customers to perceive a service as tangible. Providing exact times and activities spent on providing a service to a customer also makes it seem more tangible.

Marketing can overcome some of the inconsistency in services by using a process that is more consistent. Marketing can overcome inseparability by using intermediaries to sell and distribute services.

What Is Service Marketing – Conclusion

Service marketing is the marketing of a service business rather than a product business. Services presently account for 60 percent of the USA gross national product.

Because almost three quarters of the workforce perform services instead of making products, service businesses continue to grow. With this growth comes the need for service business owners to understand how to market their services effectively.

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Posted 11-26-08: What Is Service Marketing?

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 26th, 2008 at 6:14 am and is filed under Marketing, Other.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.