SERVICE MARKETING

Simply said, Services Marketing is the marketing of services as opposed to tangible objects.

As previously stated, services are essentially intangible, are used concurrently at the moment of production, cannot be kept, preserved, or resold once utilized, and service offers are unique and cannot be perfectly replicated even by the same service provider.

Marketing of services is a relatively new phenomenon in the marketing realm, having achieved prominence as a field only near the end of the twentieth century.

Services marketing initially came to the fore in the 1980s, when a discussion erupted over whether marketing of services differed sufficiently from the marketing of products to warrant classification as a separate subject. Previously, services were regarded as merely a help to the manufacturing and marketing of goods and hence were not regarded as having separate relevance of their own.

However, in the 1980s, there was a shift in this attitude. As the service sector grew in prominence and emerged as a significant employer and contributor to GDP, academics and marketing practitioners began to reconsider service marketing.

Empirical research was carried out, which revealed the distinctive distinguishing aspects of services.

By the mid-1990s, Services Marketing had firmly established itself as a key sub-discipline of marketing, with its empirical research and data and growing significance in the new millennium’s increasingly service-dominated economies. New fields of study emerged and were the focus of the significant empirical investigation, giving rise to concepts such as the product-service spectrum, relationship marketing, service franchising, customer retention, and so on.

The Importance Of Service Marketing

Given the intangibility of services, marketing them becomes a particularly difficult and yet crucial endeavour.

A significant differentiator: As product offerings become more homogeneous, the attendant services provided are emerging as a crucial differentiation in the minds of consumers.

For example, in the instance of two fast-food businesses selling a comparable product (Pizza Hut and Domino’s), it is the service quality that distinguishes the two companies. As a result, marketers can use service offerings to differentiate themselves from the competition and attract customers.

Relationships are important: When it comes to service marketing, relationships are crucial. Because the product is intangible, a big part of the customer’s purchasing choice will be determined by his level of faith in the vendor.

As a result, there is a need to listen to the customer’s demands and meet them through the proper service offering, as well as to establish a long-term relationship that will lead to repeat sales and positive word of mouth.

Customer Retention: In today’s highly competitive environment, where several providers compete for a limited pool of clients, maintaining customers is more crucial than acquiring new ones. Because services are typically developed and consumed at the same time, they genuinely involve the consumer in the service delivery process by taking his requirements and input into account. As a result, they provide greater potential for customization based on customer requirements, resulting in better satisfaction and higher customer retention.