SERVICES MARKETING: An Introduction To Services Marketing

Service marketing is a strategy for promoting and showcasing a company's intangible benefits and offerings in order to increase end-customer value. This can be for stand-alone service offerings or for services that are offered in conjunction with tangible products. Service marketing is a term that refers to the sale of non-physical, intangible goods. It's done for company-provided benefits that can't be seen, touched, or felt, for example. These are benefits that are primarily driven by people, processes, and that a customer cannot keep.
Service marketing is used to drive business in industries such as hospitality, tourism, financial services, and professional services.

Importance of Service Marketing
Marketers promote a variety of entities, including goods, services, events, and people. Service marketing refers to the marketing of services. Services are intangible in nature and do not imply ownership of anything. Its creation could be linked to a physical product or not.
External, internal, and interactive marketing excellence are all required for service marketing excellence. Pricing, distribution, and promotion of services to consumers are all covered by external marketing. Internal marketing entails educating and motivating employees to provide excellent customer service. The ability of the employees to serve the client is described by interactive marketing.

Factors in Service Marketing
The key factors which define marketing for services are:
1. Intangible
Unlike physical products, which can be touched, felt, and seen, services are not tangible. This distinguishes services from products, necessitating a different marketing strategy.
2. No ownership
Services can't be bought or sold; they can only be experienced. This is a broad term that refers to the customer experience.
You can own a service in the form of evidence such as plans, bills, and invoices, but you can't own it like a product.
3. Inseparability
The concept of moment of truth guides service marketing, which means that services are created and used at the same time.
They can't be stored like products in an inventory because they're made and consumed simultaneously.
4. Variability
Unlike standardised products, services vary in nature despite the same people, process, type of work, and so on. For the same service, different customers may have different experiences.
e.g. a telecom customer might get different experience for the same plan.
5. Perishability
Services, unlike products, cannot be stored and must be consumed immediately. But there's another way of looking at it. Many services or plans these days have an expiration date. They are not the same as best before dates on products, but they are more in terms of service validity.
e.g. free warranty service after 2 years of purchase.
6. People involvement
People who provide benefits and solutions to the needs of customers drive service marketing. Although many automated service solutions are being developed these days, people still play the most important role in service marketing.
Taking care of the 7Ps is part of service marketing planning. Price, location, promotion, product, people, process, and physical evidence are all factors to consider.