What Is Services Marketing?
Services marketing is a form of marketing which focuses on selling services. Services can be tricky to sell and the marketing approach for them is much different than the approach for products. Some companies offer both products and services and must use a mixture of styles; for example, a store which sells computers also tends to offer services such as helping people select computers and providing computer repair. Such a store must market both its products and the supporting services it offers to appeal to customers.
When people market services, the goal is not to get customers to buy a product, but to get people to do business with a particular company, often in a specific location. For example, a restaurant offers a service: It provides food to customers, both on-site and in to-go form in many cases. When the restaurant markets itself, it must convince people that it is preferable to other restaurants and that its facility is worth the trip.
As with the marketing of products, the marketing of services covers issues like what is being offered, what the price point is, how it compares to similar things, and why people should choose that particular iteration over other options. With services, which are often intangible in nature, consumers must also be convinced through services marketing that the service is something they need which will have some sort of benefit.
There are different approaches which can be taken in services marketing, depending on how people want the position the company and what kind of messages they want people to take away from the marketing. A company might want to project itself as reliable and trustworthy if it offers a service like security, or fun loving and adventurous for services like travel planning. In all cases, people must be shown why it is that they would want to pay for services the company offers.
Marketing schools usually discuss various techniques which can be used in services marketing. People may also develop their own techniques as they practice marketing in the real world and learn more about what people look for, how they shop for services, and what makes a service appealing. Often, the goal is to establish a personal relationship with customers so that they will return for the company's services in the future, rather than taking their business elsewhere. The loyalty is often to the quality of the service, rather than to a specific brand or image, and this makes services marketing somewhat different than product marketing, in which it is the value of the product which is important.
Written by S.E. Smith
