Services Marketing Chapter 9 Promoting an Interactive Service Experience

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Chapter 9Promoting

the Interactive Service Experience


Objectives

1. To emphasize the need for an integrated approach to marketing communications for services

2. To examine the role of the marketing mix in communicating with customers of a service

3. To discuss the role of the promotional mix in marketing communications for services

4. To examine the growing use of the Internet in promoting services


Objectives (cont'd)

5. To examine the advertising of services6. To explore sales promotions for services7. To present the role of personal selling in

services8. To discuss the role of publicity for services


Services and IntegratedMarketing Communications

• Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) refers to the pursuit of a single positioning concept for an organization or its products

• It is achieved by planning, coordinating and unifying all its communication tools (Schultz, Tannenbaum, and Lauterborn 1996), such as:– Advertising– Personal Selling– Public Relations– Online Links– Etc.


Marketing Communications and Services

• Marketing Communications can help Tangiblize a Service

• Tangibilizing the service means making the service more concrete, thus enabling customers to understand it better (Shostack 1977).

• Every element of the Services Marketing Mix can be used to accomplish this.– The traditional 4 P’s (Price, Product, Place and

Promotion), and– The additional 3 P’s (Participants, Physical Evidence,

Process of Service Assembly


The Promotional Mix• Promotion is the one element of the Services

Marketing Mix which is designed specifically to communicate

• Traditionally, a promotional effort involves a Promotional Mix of elements that incudes:– Advertising– Sales Promotions– Personal Selling– Publicity and Public Relations

• Each one is emphasized to varying degrees depending on resources, objectives, etc.


Advertising the Service• Advertising Objectives are sometimes captured

by the acronym AIDA reflecting the goals of affecting customers’:– Attention,– Interest, – Desire and– Action

• Good advertising campaign will: make personal selling easier, generate publicity, help manage PR, and pave the way for effective sales promotions


Advertising the Service (cont'd)

• Advertising can enhance the vividness of a service through a strategy that uses concrete language, tangible objects, and dramatization techniques to tangibilize the intangible. It uses:– Pictorial Representation, – Verbal Association, – and Letter Accentuation.

• These combine an organization's name and its service to establish a strong link between service name and performance in customer minds.


Advertising the Service (cont’d)

• Guidelines for Advertising a Service (George and Berry 1981) include:■ Provide tangible cues.■ Capitalize on word-of-mouth communication.■ Make the service understood.■ Establish advertising continuity.■ Advertise to employees.■ Promise what is possible.

• A good services ad will reflect several of these guidelines but necessarily all of them


Sales Promotions and Services

• Sale Promotions for a service can accomplish several end results;– Attract customers– Accommodate cyclical demand– Enhance customers’ perception of the service– Add tangibility

• Examples include coupons, special sales, free trials, contests/sweepstakes, sponsored events, etc.


Source: Adapted from George, William R., J. Patrick Kelly, and Claudia E. Marshall (1983), “Personal Selling of Services,” in Emerging Perspectives on Services Marketing, L.L. Berry, G. L Shostack and G. D. Upah (eds.), Chicago: American Marketing Association, 65-67.

Personal Selling and Services

• Concerns regarding the selling of services:– Orchestrate the service purchase– Facilitate quality assessment– Tangibilize the service– Emphasize organizational image– Use references external to the organization– Recognize the importance of all public contact

personnel– Recognize customer involvement during the service

design process


Publicity and Services

• Service organizations gain tremendously from good publicity– The information shared as publicity is typically

perceived to be objective and/or credible– The best publicity an organization receives comes

from delighted customers

• Service organizations must have plans in place to overcome or control negative publicity when it occurs

• A rapidly expanding source of publicity is found in the various social media platforms.


Promoting Services on the Internet

• The Internet is one of the most influential vehicles for services promotion

• Service organizations can qualify and target narrow segments of customers in novel and interactive ways, e.g., Amazon.com

• Advertisements can attract and link customers to online sources of information regarding service organizations and, in the case of retailing, even carry them to shopping locations and build relationships with them..


Promoting Serviceson the Internet (cont'd)

• Service organizations can also combine e-mail sales messages with Internet advertising to create a powerful combination of advertising and selling

Services Marketing Chapter 9 Promoting an Interactive Service Experience

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