Marketing services: the case of a missing product

Abstract

Services are processes, and hence service firms do not offer products that are comparable to preproduced bundles of physical resources and features that are provided by manufacturing companies. Instead the outcome of the process is an integral part of the service process which is consumed by customers as a solution to perceived problems. Thus the use of a service can be characterized as process consumption as opposed to outcome consumption, where only the outcome of a process is consumed or used. In the present article the marketing consequences of the process characteristics of services are analyzed and compared with the marketing of physical goods, which is characterized by outcome consumption. The most important difference is the fact that service firms do not offer preproduced products but processes as solutions to the problems of their customers. Because of the process nature of services, the fulfillment of promises given through external marketing is dependent on the attitudes and behavior of a large number of part‐time marketers. Moreover, operational systems and physical resources in the service system have to be customer oriented. To increase the understanding of service processes as solutions to customers’ problems and as objects of marketing, the present article proposes that the perceived service quality concept can provide a way to replace the missing product construct with a conceptual framework for planning a customer‐oriented process. This is illustrated by a case study in an industrial service context.