Mid Term Review Essay

Submitted By kmhorne
Words: 1605
Pages: 7

Services Marketing Midterm Review
Chapter 1: Understanding Services Marketing * Four characteristics of services (pg. 9-11): * Intangibility: cannot be seen, touched, held, or put on a shelf, because they lack a physical existence or form * Customer cannot purchase physical ownership of an “experience” (entertainment), “time” (consulting), or a “process” (dry cleaning). This intangible nature prevents customers fro, examining services before their actual enactment. * Inseparability: the production and consumption of the service occur simultaneously * Suggests that interaction between the customer and the service provider must occur for the service to happen * Often, the customer is in the physical presence of the service provider; and in many instances the customer must also come to the site where the service is produced. * Variability: it is hard for a service organization to standardize the quality of its service performance * Unlike physical goods, services often rely on human performance, which can vary across workers and customers and from one time to the next. Further, because services are consumed as they are produced, little or no opportunity arises to correct a defective service before it reaches the customer. * Perishability: most services cannot be produced and stored before consumption; they exist only at the time of their production. * After-sales service agreement is a supplementary service (pg. 9): * Manufactured goods come with after-sales service, and other manufactured durable goods come with a warranty * Even nondurable and consumable products often possess a customer service element * Services and physical good often have both tangible and intangible characteristics (pg. 8-9) * At one end of the continuum are pure services, at the other end pure goods; although it is hard to argue that pure services and pure goods exist, counseling services and table salt would clearly fall at opposite ends of the continuum * Both physical goods and service marketers need to exercise creativity (pg.9) * Services marketing is relevant not only to service producers but to physical goods manufacturers as well; many successful manufacturing firms have differentiated their products by offering superior customer service
Chapter 2: Frameworks for Managing the Customer’s Experience * Service Frameworks (pg. 21-26) * May perform several important functions: * Help services marketers understand service experiences by breaking services down into their individual components * Make communicating about diverse services much easier, because frameworks may include components applicable to all services * Identify specific issues organizations should consider in designing their service delivery * Specify relationships among various components that combine to produce the customer’s service experience * Any service experience can be categorized into four components: * (1) the service workers: those who interact with the customer and those who contribute to the service delivery out of the customer’s sight * (2) the service setting: both the environment in which the service is provided to the customer and areas of the organization to which the customer normally has little access * (3) the service customers: the persons receiving the service as well as others who share the service setting with them * (4) the service process: the sequence of activities necessary to deliver the service * Three types of frameworks: * The Services Marketing Mix * Most common version of the marketing mix , known as the “Four Ps” of marketing, emphasizes the key roles of product, price, promotion, and place in the development of a marketing strategy * Services marketing mix adds three new Ps—participants, physical