Service Marketing – Dressing the Invisible?

This probably is something that should have come up on the blog before all the experiences I started describing. It refers to the very crux of the subject – how to define a service?

A lot of definitions I went through describe the key attribute of a service as intangibility. A plethora of researchers have emphasized time and again on this property of services, to the extent of describing the field or service marketing as “selling the invisible”. In this era (and especially for an economy like India where a large part of the GDP comes from the service sector) a large number of substitutes are available for every service that one seeks to consume. To counter the effect of these, every firm tries to project the key attributes of its offering by the communication that it sends out. This includes both verbal and non-verbal cues used in order to enable the consumer to differentiate the brand from the clutter of other competitors promising similar offerings.

The verbal cues refer to the product promises which are quantised and projected in order to offer a direct comparison with competition. Take the phrase of the phrase “99% on time” used by Royal Cruiser, a transport firm which operates Volvo buses between various cities in West Bengal and Uttar Pradesh. To put things into perspective, Volvo bus services are viewed as being synonymous with luxury, comfort and speed. The direct competition comes from the other bus services (Volvo and non-Volvo) and the railways. Royal Cruiser employs very meticulously designed communication addressing the very difficulties that users of its competitors face. Whether it is the frequent delays of trains and buses or the huge inconvenience that one has to face in order to catch a train, Royal Cruiser quantifies a large portion of its offering to plug in each of these gaps and to enable easy comparison with competitors. This quantification brings in tangibility into virtually every step of the whole experience of travelling Royal Cruiser, seen in the standardized services on board (snacks and drinking water offered, the movies played on the AV system) and precise timing of the buses with measured on-time performances. In fact the brand proposition – travel comfortably in a Volvo bus gains a high degree of tangibility with Volvo being the key word. One could argue that no physical product is delivered in the process, but what of the physical and quantifiable attributes being added to each step of the whole experience of travelling.

A lot of such examples can be seen in the environment around us where tangibility in services is increasing all the while and the invisible is being draped in fancy clothing making the whole entity visible. So is it time to relook how we define a service and drop tangibility from being the core idea of a service?