Whether you are interested in a career in marketing or merely curious about how marketing works, this module provides an opportunity to explore marketing practice in action. The module is built around marketing communications as a fundamental marketing practice and is informed by insights from prac...
B328 Marketing in Action
BLOCK 2
Session 7: Contextualising Marketing Practice
Learning Outcomes:
- Discuss the nature of marketing in the context of services, B2B & SMEs.
- Examine commonalities and differences between these marketing contexts.
- Evaluate the relevance of general marketing tools to each context.
- Apply a range of marketing tools as best suit each context.
Services have unique characteristics that distinguish services marketing from goods-centred
marketing:
- Intangible
Services cannot be seen, touched or tasted.
- Variable
The same service may be performed differently, varying from one location to
another, from one employee to another, and from one time to another. For instance,
counselling services provided by therapists may not be the same each time. In
contrast, some service providers will seek to minimise variability through scripts,
training or automation.
- Inseparable
Services are often produced and consumed at the same time.
- Perishable
Services cannot be stored and are often delivered and consumed simultaneously.
One of the achievements of the services marketing literature is its influence on
reconfiguring how exchange is viewed across all forms of marketing. The idea of service-
dominant logic was developed by Vargo & Lusch (2004) and has been amended and
updated numerous times since then. Vargo & Lusch argue that marketing needs to move
from a concern with the movement of goods – where value is packaged within a material
object – to a concern with the transfer of value through exchange.
The characteristics of services, and the emphasis on performance and experience of that
performance, pose questions and challenges for marketers, for instance:
- How can service providers ensure the quality of their provision is managed when the
offering is largely intangible and variable (i.e. difficult to standardise)?
- How can service providers ensure that services are delivered successfully with consistent
, quality when service employees and customers are often inseparable and affect the service
outcome?
This has led to some commentators (Zeithaml et al., 2013) to suggest that service providers
need to consider:
- the people (i.e. who of those who enable the service to be performed – these can be
employees, but may also include customers)
- processes (i.e. how the service is delivered)
- physical evidence elements of the service provision (i.e. the surroundings in which the
service is performed)
The variability of services poses specific problems for managing customer expectations. The
development of branding often plays a key role in this process (Brodie, 2009). Here,
marketing communications play a critical role in creating realistic expectations as well as
reinforcing the experience once the service has been delivered. A service firm needs to be
aware of the promises it makes in its external communications to avoid creating a gap
between customer expectations and the service that can be delivered. Making exaggerated
promises in advertising or personal selling and a lack of coordination between operations
and marketing may lead to broken promises.
Given the importance of communications, the messages that are delivered about a service
will tend to concentrate on the dimensions of quality associated with a service
(Parasuraman et al., 1988), these are:
- Reliability – the service providers’ ability to perform the promised service accurately and
dependably.
- Assurance – the knowledge and courtesy of employees and their ability to inspire trust and
confidence.
- Tangibles – physical facilities, equipment and appearance of personnel.
- Empathy – the caring and individualised attention paid to customers.
- Responsiveness – the service organisations’ willingness to help customers and provide
prompt service.
With the rise in social media, an organisation’s ability to communicate these qualities needs
to incorporate the role the customer can play in the presentation of the service to other
prospective users.
Business-to-Business Marketing
All organisations buy and sell goods and/or services in order to create their own offerings.
Having added value in this way, firms then sell these products to other businesses, which
use them to create other products or perhaps to resell to consumers as finished goods.
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