Discussion 200- 250 words
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It can be harder to sell an intangible service than a tangible product. After reading Chapter 3 of the text, pick one of the cells in Table 3.4: “Service Classifications” and name a service offered in that class—for example, business remodeling service under consulting and operations. In 200 to 250 words, describe a service in your chosen category in terms of the four ways a service is different from a product—its intangibility, inseparability, variability, and perishability. Propose a solution for sale that could be used as a point of competitive differentiation in a marketing campaign.
3.4 When the Product Is a Pure Service
At the beginning of this chapter, Table 3.1 depicted product offerings on a continuum from pure goods, like soap or salt, to pure services, likehaircuts or hotel stays. While some things offered for sale fall at the ends of this continuum, most consumer offerings are actually a mix ofgood and service. A restaurant meal, for instance, combines food (a good) and the work of a kitchen and wait staff (a service).
In many ways, a marketer’s product strategy for a service is no different from that for a tangible product. Just like goods, services have todeliver customer value. As consumers we expect the services we buy to deliver reliability and fitness for use at a reasonable price, just as wedo with products.
The three perspectives that make up product strategy are essentially the same with pure services. Marketers describe service offerings from thesame three perspectives of core, expanded, and concept. Marketers think about a service in terms of how it fills a need (core service), how it isdifferentiated from other competing options and establishes its value (expanded service), and the company’s long-range strategy surrounding it(service concept).
The fundamental marketing insight of service-dominant logic—that people buy what they buy because they want the benefits that derive fromthe purchase—holds true with services as well as products. Looked at this way, there is no difference; both are simply means of delivering a”solution for sale.”
But in some ways, a service is very different from a good.
How Services Differ from Goods
Services don’t come in a box—there’s nothing new to take home after purchasing a service. That fact raises a number of issues from amarketing perspective. Four characteristics of services set them apart from products. Services are:
Intangible,
Inseparable,
Variable, and
Perishable.