Mid Term Review Essay

Mid Term Review Essay Mid Term Review Essay Services Marketing Midterm Review Chapter 1: Understanding Services Marketing * Four characteristics of services (pg. 9-11): * Intangibility: cannot be seen, touched, held, or put on a shelf, because they lack a physical existence or form * Customer cannot purchase physical ownership of an â€Å"experience† (entertainment), â€Å"time† (consulting), or a â€Å"process† (dry cleaning). This intangible nature prevents customers fro, examining services before their actual enactment. * Inseparability: the production and consumption of the service occur simultaneously * Suggests that interaction between the customer and the service provider must occur for the service to happen * Often, the customer is in the physical presence of the service provider; and in many instances the customer must also come to the site where the service is produced. * Variability: it is hard for a service organization to standardize the quality of its service performance * Unlike physical goods, services often rely on human p erformance, which can vary across workers and customers and from one time to the next. Further, because services are consumed as they are produced, little or no opportunity arises to correct a defective service before it reaches the customer. * Perishability: most services cannot be produced and stored before consumption; they exist only at the time of their production. * After-sales service agreement is a supplementary service (pg. 9): * Manufactured goods come with after-sales service, and other manufactured durable goods come with a warranty * Even nondurable and consumable products often possess a customer service element * Services and physical good often have both tangible and intangible characteristics (pg. 8-9) * At one end of the continuum are pure services, at the other end pure goods; although it is hard to argue that pure services and pure goods exist, counseling services and table salt would clearly fall at opposite ends of the continuum * Both physical goods and servic e marketers need to exercise creativity (pg.9) * Services marketing is relevant not only to service producers but to physical goods manufacturers as well; many successful manufacturing firms have differentiated their products by offering superior customer service Chapter 2: Frameworks for Managing the Customer’s Experience * Service Frameworks (pg. 21-26) * May perform several important functions: * Help services marketers understand service experiences by breaking services down into their individual components * Make communicating about diverse services much easier, because frameworks may include components applicable to all services * Identify specific issues organizations should consider in designing their service delivery * Specify relationships among various components that combine to produce the customer’s service experience * Any service experience can be categorized into four components: * (1) the service workers: those who interact with the customer and those who contribute to the service delivery out of the customer’s sight * (2) the service setting: both the environment in which the service is provided to the customer and areas of the organization to which the customer normally has little access * (3) the servi ce customers: the persons receiving the service as well as others who share the service setting with them * (4) the service process: the sequence of activities necessary to deliver the service * Three types of frameworks: * The Services Marketing Mix * Most common version of the marketing mix , known as the â€Å"Four Ps† of marketing, emphasizes the key roles of product, price, promotion, and place in the development of a marketing strategy * Services marketing mix adds three new Ps- participants, physical