Breaking Free from Product Marketing

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.Service marketing, to be effective and successful, requires a mirror-opposite view of conventional "product" practices. NEW CONCEPTS are necessary if service marketing is to succeed. Service marketing is an uncharted frontier. Despite the increasing dominance of services in the U.S. economy, basic texts still disagree on how services should be treated in a marketing context.1The heart of this dispute is the issue of applicability. The classic marketing "mix," the seminal literature, and the language of marketing all derive from the manufacture of physical goods. Practicing marketers tend to think in terms of products, particularly mass-market consumer goods. Some service companies even call their output "products" and have "product" management functions modeled after those of experts such as Procter and Gamble.Marketing seems to be overwhelmingly product-oriented. However, many service-based companies are confused about the applicability of product marketing, and more than one attempt to adopt product marketing has failed.Merely adopting product marketing's labels does not resolve the question of whether product marketing can be overlaid on service businesses. Can corporate banking services really be marketed according to the same basic blueprint that made Tide a success? Given marketing's historic tenets, there is simply no alternative.Could marketing itself be "myopic" in having failed to create relevant paradigms for the service sector? Many marketing professionals who transfer to the services arena find their work fundamentally "different," but have a difficult time

Inside service-intensive projects: Analyzing inbuilt tensions

“…Post-project exchange can include mandatory facilitating services, and optional supporting services, which tend to increase the value of the supplied system (Kujala et al, 2013). Additionally, exchange can develop beyond the augmented service complementing the supplied system, to an intangible core service (Blomquist and Wilson, 2007;Shostack, 1977) that might not be directly linked to the supplied system such as consultation services (Ojansivu et al, 2014). Thus, it is difficult to predict the exchange beyond a minimum service level that is required to keep the system functional.…”

Service Quality, Perceived Value and Customer Satisfaction as Determinant of Airline Choice in Nigeria

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Exploring the Relationships among Service Quality, Satisfaction, Trust and Store Loyalty among Retail Customers

“…Literature published in the late 1970s and early 1980s provided a clearer understanding of service quality and its measurement. For example, Shostack (1977) and Lovelock (2000) recognized the intangible characteristic of services and that most services are performances rather than objects…”