Service Product Marketing

Essay by v0504University, Bachelor's August 2007

download word file, 22 pages 3.0

Downloaded 156 times

1. INTRODUCTIONOver the past decade, customers are becoming harder and harder to be pleased with what were delivered to them in exchange of the customer's disposable income (Parasuraman et al. 1985) (Reichheld & Sasser 1990). Nowadays, customers are more critical to product / service they purchase. Enterprises are trying to offer something innovative to differentiate them selves among the ever increasing competition.

Prior to any purchasing decision, according to Kotler (1973), one of the four P's - the place can be more influential than the product itself. Later developed by Mehrabian & Russel (1974) that publish the Mehrabian-Russell Model that draw situational factor such as mood & expectation. Servicescape later popularized by Bitner (1992), the physical environment surrounding customers & employees is termed servicescape. Ever since, this has been the subject of many scholars and practitioners.

As an influential factor for customers to make purchasing decision, it clearly a very important subject for any marketers as an effort to increase revenue and to stay competitive in the marketplace (Hightower et al.

2000).

Marketers from any type of industry can really integrate servicescape into marketing plans. The industry can be sport such as softball (Robinson 1997) (King 2000); hospitality such as nightclubs, hotels, restaurants (Jones et al. 2003) (Clarke et al. 1998) (Skinner et al. 2005); and many more.

This paper tries to describe the importance of the main elements (i.e. ambient condition, spatial layout / functionality, signs / symbols / artefacts) (Bitner 1992). A few additional elements later developed that found can be influential to consumer behaviour are music (Jacob 2006), aesthetic design of virtual servicescape on the companies' websites (Rafaeli & Vilnal-Yavetz 2006); the sex of service provider (Fischer et al. 1997). In order to give better understanding about the servicescape and its application in real-world companies, three firms...