The service sector is growing rapidly worldwide. Majority of developed and developing countries experience the development of many service industries, which participate significantly in the national economies.
P. Kotler suggested that ”service is an activity or benefit that one party can offer to another that is essentially intangible and does not result in the ownership of anything. Its production may or may not be tied to a physical product”.
There are four characteristics of service: Intangibility, Inseparability, Variability, and Perishability (Kotler and Keller, 2007).
- As service's nature is intangibility, therefore manufacturing and service delivery is more complex than a product.
- Inseparability is a significant characteristic that distinguishes a service from a product according to the simultaneous production and consumption.
- Due to the service's variability, it's difficult to be controlled, because it greatly relies on the service's provider, moreover when, where and how it's provided.
- Perishability is one of the major characteristics of service, that it can't be stored for later use or sale (No inventory).
In order to deliver the overall service offer to a target market, the marketing mix elements should be coherent, coordinated, integrated and consistent with each other to produce the synergistic effect of them. (Lovelock, 2001).
The main objective of service marketers is to create and provide service that satisfies consumer needs and expectations, therefore achieving organizational goals. Consequently, marketers should work on understanding how people make their buying decisions and what determines their satisfaction during the service consumption stages: pre-purchase, service encounter, and post-encounter.
To gain a competitive advantage in the global market, successful organization should adopt the marketing strategy (overall cost leadership / differentiation / focus) that is based on the marketing concept which holds that the key to achieving company’s organizational goals is being more effective than competitors in creating, delivering, and communicating superior customer value to target customers, and therefore ensuring profits through customer satisfaction.
The positioning of services is even more important than the positioning of goods because services tend to be intangible, so differentiation becomes a key issue in making the service distinctive in the perception of the customer's mind. Positioning is concerned with the identification, development, and communication of the attributes which a service company intends to use to make its market offering recognizable and superior to the competing services.
A customer-focused organization requires improving service quality as a critical element of differentiation. It's related to the long-term evaluation of the service performance and is crucial to customer satisfaction which is the difference between perception and expectation, moreover, customer satisfaction will become a key factor for business success in the future.
In order to develop long-term relationships, it is necessary to build customer involvement, commitment, and trust. In service companies focused on building loyalty, customer service plays an important role in their marketing strategies and is an essential element in creating service quality and customer satisfaction.
An organization which strategy focuses on delivering service excellence was more successful. This era is the era of customers and for the success and survival in this competitive market, organizations should emphasize on quality service and this should be integrated into the strategy (Chowdhary and Prakash, 2007).
Author: Hend Hassan, lecturer at LIGS University
References
Chowdhary, Prakash, (2007) "Prioritizing service quality dimensions", Managing Service Quality: An International Journal, Vol. 17 Issue: 5, pp.493-509, //doi.org/10.1108/09604520710817325
Kotler, P., and Keller (2007) A Framework for Marketing Management 3rd ed. New Jersey: Prentice Hall.
Lovelock, C.H., Patterson, P.G. and R.H. Walker, (2001). “Services Marketing: An Asia-Pacific Perspective”, 2nd edition, Prentice Hall, NSW.
Read Online (Free) relies on page scans, which are not currently available to screen readers. To access this article, please contact JSTOR User Support . We'll provide a PDF copy for your screen reader.
With a personal account, you can read up to 100 articles each month for free.
Get StartedAlready have an account? Log in
Monthly Plan
- Access everything in the JPASS collection
- Read the full-text of every article
- Download up to 10 article PDFs to save and keep
Yearly Plan
- Access everything in the JPASS collection
- Read the full-text of every article
- Download up to 120 article PDFs to save and keep
Log in through your institution
Purchase a PDF
Purchase this article for $41.50 USD.
How does it work?
- Select the purchase option.
- Check out using a credit card or bank account with PayPal.
- Read your article online and download the PDF from your email or your account.
journal article
A Conceptual Model of Service Quality and Its Implications for Future ResearchJournal of Marketing
Vol. 49, No. 4 (Autumn, 1985)
, pp. 41-50 (10 pages)
Published By: Sage Publications, Inc.
//doi.org/10.2307/1251430
//www.jstor.org/stable/1251430
Read and download
Log in through your school or library
Alternate access options
For independent researchers
Read Online
Read 100 articles/month free
Subscribe to JPASS
Unlimited reading + 10 downloads
Purchase article
$41.50 - Download now and later
Abstract
The attainment of quality in products and services has become a pivotal concern of the 1980s. While quality in tangible goods has been described and measured by marketers, quality in services is largely undefined and unresearched. The authors attempt to rectify this situation by reporting the insights obtained in an extensive exploratory investigation of quality in four service businesses and by developing a model of service quality. Propositions and recommendations to stimulate future research about service quality are offered.
Journal Information
The Journal of Marketing (JM) develops and disseminates knowledge about real-world marketing questions relevant to scholars, educators, managers, consumers, policy makers and other societal stakeholders. It is the premier outlet for substantive research in marketing. Since its founding in 1936, JM has played a significant role in shaping the content and boundaries of the marketing discipline?
Publisher Information
Sara Miller McCune founded SAGE Publishing in 1965 to support the dissemination of usable knowledge and educate a global community. SAGE is a leading international provider of innovative, high-quality content publishing more than 900 journals and over 800 new books each year, spanning a wide range of subject areas. A growing selection of library products includes archives, data, case studies and video. SAGE remains majority owned by our founder and after her lifetime will become owned by a charitable trust that secures the company’s continued independence. Principal offices are located in Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore, Washington DC and Melbourne. www.sagepublishing.com
Rights & Usage
This item is part of a JSTOR
Collection.
For terms and use, please refer to our Terms and Conditions
Journal of Marketing
Request Permissions