The marketing of services 607
Marketing requires all of these departments to
‘think customer’ and to work together to satisfy
customer needs and expectations. There is
argument as to what authority the traditional
marketing department should have in bringing
about this customer orientation. In a truly
mature marketing-oriented service company,
marketing is an implicit part of everybody’s
job. In such a scenario, marketing becomes
responsible for a narrow range of specialist
functions such as advertising and marketing
research. Responsibility for the relationship
between the organization and its customers is
spread more diffusely throughout the
organization.
There is some evidence of the possibly
harmful effect of placing too much authority in
the marketing department of services organiza-
tions. In a survey of 219 executives representing
public and private sector services organizations
in Sweden, Gronroos (1982) tested the idea that
a separate marketing department may widen
the gap between marketing and operations
staff. This idea was put to a sample drawn from
marketing as well as other functional positions.
The results indicated that respondents in a
wide range of service organizations considered
there to be dangers in the creation of a
marketing department – an average of 66 per
cent agreed with the notion, with higher than
average agreement being found among non-
marketing executives, and those working in the
hotel, restaurant, professional services and
insurance sectors.
Summary
The services sector is now a dominant part of the
economies of most developed countries. How-
ever, defining just what is meant by a service has
caused some debate and this chapter has
reviewed some of the bases for classifying
services into categories that are useful for the
purposes of marketing management. Pure ser-
vices are distinguished by the characteristics of
intangibility, inseparability, perishability, varia-
bility and a lack of ownership. Increasingly,
however, goods and services are converging in
terms of these characteristics. Buyer–seller rela-
tionships and consumer experiences are supple-
menting services as a basis for competitive
differentiation of product offers. Few products
can be described as pure goods or pure services- most are a combination of the two. There has
been considerable debate about whether a new
set of principles of marketing are required to
understand services, or whether the established
basic principles merely need adapting to the
needs of services. The traditional marketing mix
of the ‘4Ps’ has been found to be inadequate for
managers in the services sector and this chapter
has discussed an alternative extended market-
ing mix of ‘7Ps’, which recognizes the distinctive
characteristics of services.
References
Bitner, M. J., Booms, B. H. and Tetreault, M. S.
(1990) The Service Encounter: Diagnosing
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Booms, B. H. and Bitner, M. J. (1981) Marketing
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Marketing Association, Chicago, IL, pp. 51–
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Borden, N. H. (1965) The Concept of the
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