Innovation in the Service Sector: Some Empirical Findings

Abstract

The service economy and its associated marketing practices has been receiving considerable attention in the marketing literature [2, 3, 8, 9, 10]. The primary impetus for this recognition has come from the increased importance of services to the economy as a whole [2, 17]. The nature of services has been found to cause some variations in the application of marketing concepts to services as compared with products. For instance, communication strategies for services may differ from those used for products since services cannot be displayed and are often difficult to demonstrate [4, p. 9]. These differences between products and services might also imply differences in consumer behavior patterns between the two areas. The local and personal nature of most services suggests that consumers may utilize different information sources to learn about new services than they do for products. In addition, the nonstandardized and intangible nature of services [9, pp. 34-5] could imply consumer application of different evaluative criteria and thus require different types of consumer expertise in the evaluation process. The study reported here attempts to determine the characteristics of innovators in one area of the service industry-retailing. The marketing literature contains several studies that have provided information on the characteristics of innovators in various product areas, many of which are summarized in [11]. However, to date the only studies of innovation in the service sector have concerned the adoption of service innovations by firms [8, 19] and word-of-mouth communication patterns of innovators of an automotive diagnostic service [1 ]. A related area of diffusion of innovation research has concerned the extent to which change agents (innovators and opinion leaders) exist across product