The marketing of services 591
customers’ needs, it also has the effect of
reducing variability of processes and
outcomes.
The variability of service output can pose
problems for brand building in services com-
pared to tangible goods. For the latter it is
usually relatively easy to incorporate monitor-
ing and quality control procedures into produc-
tion processes in order to ensure that a brand
stands for a consistency of output. The service
sector’s attempts to reduce variability concen-
trate on methods used to select, train, motivate
and control personnel. In some cases, service
offers have been simplified, jobs have been ‘de-
skilled’ and personnel replaced with machines
in order to reduce human variability.
Perishability
Services differ from goods in that they cannot
be stored. Producers of most manufactured
goods who are unable to sell all of their output
in the current period can carry forward stocks
to sell in a subsequent period. The only
significant costs are storage costs, financing
costs and the possibility of loss through wast-
age or obsolescence. By contrast, the producer
of a service which cannot sell all of its output
produced in the current period gets no chance
to carry it forward for sale in a subsequent
period. A bus company which offers seats on a
bus leaving Manchester for Bury cannot sell
any empty seats once the bus has completed its
journey. The service offer disappears and spare
seats cannot be stored to meet a surge in
demand, which may occur at a later time.
Very few services face a constant pattern of
demand through time. Many show considerable
variation, which could follow a daily pattern
(e.g. city centre sandwich bars at lunch time),
weekly (the Friday evening peak in demand for
railway travel), seasonal (hotels, stores at Christ-
mas time), cyclical (mortgages) or an unpredict-
able pattern of demand (emergency building
repair services following heavy storms).
The perishability of services results in
greater attention having to be paid to the
management of demand by evening out peaks
and troughs in demand and in scheduling
service production to follow this pattern as far
as possible. It is not good enough to ensure that
supply and demand are matched overall in the
long term. They must match for each minute
and for each place that service is offered.
Pricing and promotion are two of the tools
commonly adopted to resolve demand and
supply imbalances.Inability to own services
The inability to own a service is related to the
characteristics of intangibility and perishability.
In purchasing goods, buyers generally acquire
title to the goods in question and can subse-
quently do as they wish with them. On the
other hand, when a service is performed, no
ownership is transferred from the seller to the
buyer. The buyer is merely buying the right to
a service process such as the use of a car park or
an accountant’s time. A distinction should be
drawn between the inability to own the service
act and the rights which a buyer may acquire to
have a service carried out at some time in the
future (a theatre gift voucher, for example).
The inability to own a service has implica-
tions for the design of distribution channels, so
a wholesaler or retailer cannot take title, as is
the case with goods. Instead, direct distribution
methods are more common and, where inter-
mediaries are used, they generally act as a co-
producer with the service provider.Classification of services
It was noted earlier that the services sector has
come to dominate the economies of most
western countries. But this dominance has
come about through a diverse range of services,
so diverse that many have questioned whether
the term services is too general to be of any use
to marketers.
Many have pointed out that services and
goods are very closely intertwined. Theodore