Breaking Free from Product Marketing Article Analysis

For years now, it can be denied that service industries have been becoming an important part of world’s economy. In 2006, service sector accounted for 71 percentages of European Union’s gross domestic production (Services marketing, 2008). Besides, reality shows that service marketing brings much hardship which is due to the unique characteristics of services: being produced and consumed at the same time for marketers. Therefore, operating service business generates much more new issues than operating classic product business. As a result, new concept as well as principles and models for service marketing are required for marketers to deal with the new situations. This report will show briefly the special features of services, how to apply new concept of marketing created from these features into reality, then some marketing entities such as molecular model or other ways of approaching service marketing will also be mentioned.
Compared to classic goods that are usually manufactured in factories and then distributed to customers, services are a newer kind of products which are unique and do not take much time from production to customers with three key characteristics: intangibility, heterogeneity and perishability. These three special features lead to fundamental challenges for service marketers and managers namely standardization in general and personalization of services’ quality, employee commitment, coordination between departments, etc. In order to take relevant actions and achieve success, service marketers and managers should aware of these problems.
The most obvious feature of services is intangibility and making room for intangibility in marketing is significantly important in marketing according to the article. Because of the high in credence qualities, services and pure services make customers hard to evaluate them even after purchasing and experiencing. Services are not “intangible products”. Services require experience, time and process. That