588 The Marketing Book
movement towards value through experiences
is quite patchy, as witnessed by the profitable
growth of ‘no frills’ retailers, hotels and
airlines.
What are services?
It can be difficult to define just what is meant
by a service because most products we buy
contain a mixture of goods elements and
service elements. A meal in a restaurant con-
tains a combination of goods elements (the
food) and service elements (the manner in
which the food is served). Even apparently
‘pure’ goods such as timber often contain
service elements, such as the service required in
transporting timber from where it was pro-
duced to where a customer requires it.
Modern definitions of services focus on the
fact that a service in itself produces no tangible
output, although it may be instrumental in
producing some tangible output. A contempo-
rary definition is provided by Kotler et al.
(2001):
A service is any activity or benefit that one
party can offer to another which is essentially
intangible and does not result in the ownership
of anything.In a more tongue-in-cheek manner, services
have been described as ‘anything which cannot
be dropped on your foot’.
‘Pure’ services have a number of distinc-
tive characteristics that differentiate them from
goods and have implications for the manner in
which they are marketed. These characteristics
are often described as intangibility, insepar-
ability, variability, perishability and the inabil-
ity to own a service.
Intangibility
A pure service cannot be assessed using any of
the physical senses – it is an abstraction which
cannot be directly examined before it is pur-
chased. A prospective purchaser of most goods
is able to examine the goods for physical
integrity, aesthetic appearance, taste, smell etc.
Many advertising claims relating to these tan-
gible properties can be verified by inspection
prior to purchase. On the other hand, pure
services have no tangible properties which can
be used by consumers to verify advertising
claims before the purchase is made. The intan-
gible process characteristics which define
services, such as reliability, personal care, atten-
tiveness of staff, their friendliness etc., can only
be verified once a service has been purchased
and consumed. Goods generally have tangible
benchmarks against which quality can be
assessed (e.g. durability, reliability, taste). In the
case of services, these benchmarks can often
only be defined in the minds of consumers. So
while there may be little doubt that a car which
has leather seats is of better quality than one
with cloth seats, the same quality judgement
cannot be made between say, a restaurant meal
that takes one hour and another that takes two
hours. In the latter case, the expectations of
diners are crucial to an understanding of their
perceptions of service quality, which may not
be the same as the judgements of an outside
observer.
The level of tangibility present in a service
offer derives from three principal sources: tangible goods, which are included in the
service offer and consumed by the user;
the physical environment in which the service
production/consumption process takes place;
and
tangible evidence of service performance.Where goods form an important component of
a service offer, many of the practices associated
with conventional goods marketing can be
applied to this part of the service offer. Restau-
rants represent a mix of tangibles and intan-
gibles, and in respect of the food element few of
the particular characteristics of services market-
ing are encountered. The presence of a tangible
component gives customers a visible basis on