Page 22 - DMGT510_SERVICES_MARKETING

Unit 1: Introduction to Services Marketing

4. How can LBS overcome the inherent drawbacks and disadvantages from its offer Notes
characteristics?
5. “HLL turned over a ‘new leaf’”. Explain the significance and irony of the statement
with regard to brand HLL.

Source: ORG-MARG sales audit report
Note: This case has been prepared from various news reports and analysis of the cosmetic and
beauty industry, appearing in Business Line, the financial daily from The Hindu group of
publications etc. Contributors of reports are: Reeba Zachariah, Nandini Lakshman and Sanjay
Pillai, Shweta Jain, Ratna Bhushan, Ajita Shashidhar. The news reports stretch from July 02, 2002
to November 02, 2004.

Self Assessment

State whether the following statements are true or false:
12. Courier services are low contact services.

13. Teaching is a high contact service.
14. Hair cutting service is provided by unskilled personnel.
15. Fast food restaurant services are high on extent of physical goods content.

1.5 Summary

Services have become an integral part of any economy’s infrastructure and have become

indispensable to urban life.
Services marketing is marketing based on relationship and value. It may be used to

market a service or a product. Marketing a service-base business is different from marketing
a product-base business.
There are four special characteristics of services: intangibility, perishibility, variability

and inseparability.
A customer cannot see, touch, or feel the service product. There is also no scope for the

customer to make impulse purchase decisions as triggered by visual images and the
touch-and-feel factor – which are not any way possible in intangible service offers.
These are the ways in which intangibility can be overcome: Visualization, Association,

Physical Representation and Documentation.
The perishibility factor prevents a service marketer from storing his offers. This robs him

of the privilege of delayed sales. The service marketer suffers from lost opportunities.
Methods to overcome perishibility are: over-marketing, managing demand and managing
supply.

Variability conveys to the customer an element of inconsistency and non- standardization

in the service offer and service delivery. The customer’s service encounters are different
every time. This can be overcome by training of internal customers, proper recruitment
and selection of other customers, training of external customers and automation.

Services can be differentiated from products based on factors such as the nature of the

product, customer involvement in the production process, people as part of the product,
quality control problems, difficulty in evaluation, absence of inventories, importance of
the time factor, and nature of distribution channels.

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