Service Marketing

Service Marketing is the marketing of intangible products, such as hairdressing, cleaning, insurance and travel.
Marketing a service-base business is different from marketing a goods-base business.
There are several major differences, including:
1.The buyer purchases are intangible
2.The service may be based on the reputation of a single person
3.It's more difficult to compare the quality of similar services
4.The buyer cannot return the service

Service
What is a Service?
•A service is the action of doing something for someone or something. It is largely intangible (i.e. not material). A product is tangible (i.e. material) since you can touch it and own it. A service tends to be an experience that is consumed at the point where it is purchased, and cannot be owned since is quickly perishes.

•The term Service is used in so many other industry buzwords, namely Web Services, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) and Application Service Provider (ASP). It's an extremely overloaded term. However, Services marketing is marketing based on relationship and value. It may be used to market a service or a product. It's a strange almost mythical combination of competing requirements, which is it is both isolated and interoperable.

Characteristics of a Service
There are five characteristics to a service which are considered below:
•Lack of ownership.
You cannot own and store a service like you can a product. Services are used or hired for a period of time. For example when buying a ticket to the UK the service lasts maybe 9 hours each way , but consumers want and expect excellent service for that time. Because you can measure the duration of the service consumers become more demanding of it.
•Intangibility
You cannot hold or touch a service unlike a product. In saying that although services are intangible the experience consumers obtain from the service has an impact on how they will perceive it. What do consumers perceive from customer service? The location and the inner presentation of where they are purchasing the service?
•Inseparability
Services cannot be separated from the service providers. A product when produced can be taken away from the producer. However a service is produced at or near the point of purchase. Take visiting a restaurant, you order your meal, the waiting and delivery of the meal, the service provided by the waiter/ress is all apart of the service production process and is inseparable, the staff in a restaurant are as apart of the process as well as the quality of food provided.
•Perishibility
Services last a specific time and cannot be stored like a product for later use. If travelling by train, coach or air the service will only last the duration of the journey. The service is developed and used almost simultaneously. Again because of this time constraint consumers demand more.
•Heterogeneity
It is very difficult to make each service experience identical. If travelling by plane the service quality may differ from the first time you travelled by that airline to the second, because the airhostess is more or less experienced.. Generally systems and procedures are put into place to make sure the service provided is consistent all the time, training in service organisations is essential for this, however in saying this there will always be subtle differences.