The tale of peddling services is as old as the hills. But never has a period in business history seen such an aggressive marketing of services. No business prognosticator could have forecast such a brutal fight for customer money, such a struggle for existence and such revolutionary changes in the service industries to satiate the escalating expectations of consumers. In services, from airlines to education, the market players are going out of their way to pamper the buyers and to cajole them with new features, fresh perks, lower prices, more benefits and choices wider than ever to choose from. And, as an entirely new set of competitors is entering the industry to establish an enhanced meaning of value to customers, the older players are being compelled to bow to the pressure and to match with their offerings.

Services are intangible and heterogeneous. While intangibility means that services cannot be displayed, physically demonstrated or illustrated, heterogeneity means that consumers cannot be certain about performance on any given day. These inherent properties of services lead them to possess very few search qualities (the attributes that a customer can determine before purchasing a product like color, style, feel, smell etc) and more of experience qualities (for their attributes cannot be known or assessed until they have been purchased and consumed) and credence qualities (the characteristics that the consumer may find impossible to evaluate even after purchase and consumption). For instance, services such as vacations and restaurant meals are high in experience qualities. And offerings of services high in credence are surgeries, consultation and brake relining on automobiles. Services high in experience and credence qualities are very difficult, if not impossible, to evaluate. Moreover, customer satisfaction is dependent on a factor called inseparability of production and consumption that is deep-seated in most of the services and implies that the buyer usually participates in producing the service, thereby affecting the performance and quality of service. For example, a doctor’s accurate diagnosis, the desired haircut from a parlor, effective stitching of the dress material depend on the consumer’s specification, communication and participation in the production of services.

All such factors make selling of services more complicated than ever. And to meet the challenging task of winning the competitive warfare it has become imperative for the market players to sensibly tangibilise their services by correct positioning and effective communication of the core benefit.

Positioning of services
A service is considered to be successfully positioned if it establishes and strives hard to maintain a distinctive and desirable place for itself in the consumers’ mind in relation to the other competing organisations and offerings. If a service is successfully positioned, the mention of the service will conjure up in the customer’s mind an image that is distinct from images of similar service offerings.
Hence it is imperative to position the service on something that is important to consumers, something that can serve to distinguish its services from its rivals and something that can be delivered consistently. Services can be positioned according to the demands they satisfy, the benefits they deliver, who uses them and how are they used. Organizations may choose to focus on one or more of the five dimensions of service quality in developing an effective position viz. reliability, responsiveness, assurance, empathy and tangibles.
By oft-repeating the slogan “when it absolutely, positively, has to get there”, Federal Express is probably the most well known example of a company that has focussed on reliability.

Reliability can work well as an effective dimension of positioning service as long as it can be maintained as a distinguishing characteristic feature among their competitors. However in the industries where reliability on the core service is a basic requirement, it is not likely to be a successful differentiating factor.

Responsiveness
Some of the service sellers choose to focus on responsiveness by responding to the desires of the customers by prompt, “willing-to-help” services. One such organoisation that has always focussed on responsiveness is American Express, by offering the number of hours to replace a lost card, the number of days to process a card application and number of hours for a retailer to receive an answer to a billing question.

Assurance
This factor is used effectively in the industries where trust and confidence in the service provider are particularly critical. For instance, the insurance companies frequently use assurance-based advertising tag lines to build customer confidence like “Own a piece of the rock” (Prudential). Similarly Mayo Clinic says “Trust your health to the name you know”.

Empathy
Firms can position themselves on empathy which caters to customer’s desire for individualised attention. Lufthansa, for instance, has established its position as a carrier that understands individual needs of customers from a variety of cultures. It’s slogan “the difference between worldwide and worldwise” and an ad showing a very touching interaction between a pilot and a small child captures the idea of empathy.

Tangibles
Tangibles are a common positioning element for resorts, hotels, restaurants and retailers. For example, in positioning its highly successful book store chain, Barnes and Noble has supported its position as an “entertaining social environment” through providing plenty of welcoming public space, sophisticated and stylish display and cafes where people can drink coffee while they read and restrooms so that people can relax for as long as they wish.

Service positioning is useful in establishing a new service image as well as for maintaining and repositioning existing services. Some of the instances are as follows:
¨Positioning is critical in establishing a new service image. For instance, when Speedi-Lube, the first company to offer the ten-minute lube and oil change service, was introduced no one was familiar with the concept nor had anyone experienced it. Relying on straight-forward to-the-point advertising using clean crisp letters in blue “SPEEDI-LUBE, 10-MINUTE OIL CHANGE, NO APPOINTMENT, OPEN 7 DAYS, 9 TO 6” the company established an image for itself before long.

¨Positioning is essential for existing services in maintaining and reinforcing an established image in customers’ minds. One such instance is Marriott’s Residence that has positioned itself as “home-away-from-home”. Marriott’s has effectively established this position in the minds of the consumers.

¨Thirdly, service repositioning is used to change the image of services in the minds of consumers. This was the case for Charles Schwab & Co., a large US discount brokerage company, which gradually evolved its position from one of focusing on discount financial services for independent investors based almost entirely on price as the differentiator to one focusing more on value plus price. The value component was added to the service position by rapid automation and proliferation of branches. Through these changes the customers came to see Charles Schwab & Co as a broker with good value for commission, few transaction errors, amenities for trading anytime anywhere and with easy-to-understand commission structure.

Branding of services
To build a powerful service brand that will mean satisfaction, quality and value to the customers the service seller has to understand customer needs, deliver superior quality on attributes that matter to customers, low “cost of quality” and overall cost leadership. The five steps for effectively branding services are building a brand proposition, overcoming internal barriers, measuring delivery against the proposition, continual improvement and expansion. It is also recommended to develop a “service contract” internally to create ownership for the service brand across all levels of the organization.
The four elements under which an identity is typically developed for a brand are:

Brand as a product
This deals with the tangible and intangible aspects of the product and the manner in which the customer relates to it.
Brand as organization
This is about the organisation’s innovation, customer concern etc which are important for building strong brands.
Brand as person
This implies the personality aspects of the brand and tells us what happens to it when it is converted to a person by endowing it with social, demographic and psychographic values.
Brand as symbol
This deals with the symbolic aspects of the brand like visual imagery, logo, brand heritage etc.
Thus any given brand can be described in terms of these four elements. The table titled An approach to branding of services discusses briefly the factors that largely affect these four elementary dimensions in services that are high in search qualities, in experience qualities and credence qualities.

Effective communication of the core benefit
Since services are ethereal, it is a challenging task to effectively communicate about their core values. While there has been many an advice from service scholars to tangibilise service, many approaches seen in practice often fail to capture and communicate the core service benefit. Some creative service communication strategies considered to have helped the service sellers stand out in the crowd have been discussed below.

Creative service communication strategies
* Physical representation entails showing physical components of the service delivery system to represent a service brand (for instance UPS vans delivery packages)
* Performance documentation entails presenting objectively documented data as per performance (e.g. the punctuality record of an airline)

* Performance episode strategy depicts a typical service delivery incidence (e.g. a Federal Express employee going out of the way to deliver a package to a hapless customer)
* Service consumption documentation features testimonials from customers about some aspect of service (e.g. picturing a genuine customer facing the camera and praising the service)
* Service consumption episode depicts a typical customer experiencing the service (e.g. by showing a consumer witnessing he fast download speed of a website and being thrilled about it.)
* Direct benefit statement that tells about the benefit of the service (e.g. “gives fresh breath” or “4 percent interest rate”)
* Use of logos and icons as symbols of the service (e.g. McDonald’s Golden Arch)

Consumer decision stages and communication tasks
As a consumer moves through a sequence of decision stages, the communication tasks prove to be different in every stage. The consumer decision stages comprise of the following five phases viz. problem recognition, evoked and consideration set formation, pre-purchase evaluation, acquisition and use and post-use evaluation. The aforementioned communication strategies are matched with the different service communication tasks at various consumer decision stages as discussed here under.

Problem recognition
At this stage the consumer senses a problem and looks for a solution. Advertising in this stage has to make a connection in the consumer mind between the consumer problem and the service per se as its solution. For new services, problem recognition may simply entail making the consumer aware of what his service does and how it can be of use to the consumer i.e. by direct benefit statement.

Consumers, even if it is intangible, easily understand often the new service benefit (e.g. the benefits of home delivery of groceries or a high speed internet connection). The task of problem recognition is, however, more demanding when the direct benefit of the new service is not immediately valued by the target customers. These customers need a demonstration of the second-order benefit of service. In DSL, for instance, where high speed by itself does not draw a customer, the second order benefit of, let us suppose, faster online trade execution might be appealing and this can be conveyed affectively by a comparison of two customers trading online with a slow versus a fast connection and the DSL customer delighted with the faster execution and therefore a more favourable trade price (a consumption episode strategy).
Evoked and consideration set placement
Once the problem is recognized, the next task is to place the brand into the consumer’s evoked and consideration sets. In the case of the DSL service, for instance, someone viewing an ad could buy the basic idea but then patronize a competing DSL service provider. To help the advertising create brand awareness and brand evocation, it is essential that the brand has a clear identity. Brand identity is created by associating the brand name with some sensory image like a symbol, logo, graphics or other visual form that lingers in the minds of the customers or prospective customers. For services, symbols usually have to carry the entire burden and must at the minimum be unique in the visual form (e.g. Embassy Suite’s stylised “E” and Radisson’s Font style). Uniqueness will, at the most enable brand identity, but not placement, into consideration set. The latter would require service differentiation which in turn requires that the symbols be connotative as well and capture the core meaning of the service for instance Merrill Lynch’s bull, Traveler’s umbrella and Lucent Technologies’ dab of the red paint ring signifying energy and innovation.

Physical representations serves brand identity the best if the service system has unique visual forms and the physical system components have connotative overtones (e.g. the networked globe icon on bright coloured brown vehicles of UPS). Without any uniqueness, physical representation does nothing for brand identity and evocation.

An even more potent tool for consideration set placement is a core value proposition statement that differentiates the service brand. Though the core values in services are intangible, its communication need not suffer from the intangibility’s pitfall properties of generality or abstractness. The core value proposition (which is a direct benefit strategy) should be phrased in a concrete meaningful way like the Charles Schwab value proposition “we are custodians of your financial dreams”.

Pre-purchase evaluation
A service’s end product is typically intangible, but many components of its service delivery system are tangible. The choice of a tangible or an intangible feature in advertising should depend on which attributes are “determinant” – those which the customer employs in evaluating an option and on which the brand is not at parity. Communicating an intangible feature is more challenging but that is no excuse for diverting advertising to a tangible feature, if the determinant attribute in a particular case is an intangible one.

An attribute can be communicated by linking it to relevant tangible elements of the service delivery system or by linking it to a more intangible outcomes. For instance, if the wireless services want to illustrate freedom from dropped calls, instead of simply citing the objective or making the customers talk to the camera about the efficiency of the system, the “dropped call” feature can be better communicated by focussing on a more intangible benefit like “you will never lose a sales prospect due to a dropped call”. An intangible execution of other determinant attributes can also be communicated by performance episode where a service firm is shown meticulously delivering that attribute.

For some target audiences, such intangible executions may be more appealing than corresponding tangible execution. What makes an ad lose its effectiveness is failing to avoid the pitfall properties of intangibility. A statement like “Our name stands for reliability” becomes bland and loses its impact. In order to make the intangible attribute more specific and searchable, it is advisable to resort to a mere direct statement that has a greater persuasion power.

Service acquisition and consumption
Customers are able to assess the service performance in this service consumption stage. The perceived performance depends on actual performance but the latter is not always obvious to the service recipient. Therefore, and perception shaping is an important communication task at this stage. One way of doing this is by bringing the service work from below to above the “line of visibility”. To illustrate, when the customers who are getting their motor cars repaired are allowed to watch the arduous work of fixing up the car, they appreciate why they have to pay the extra money. If bringing such transparency to service work by physical relocation is not possible then the customers can be educated by communications. Such communications can take the form of point-of-purchase (POP) information displays or personal educational selling. Giving the service process the much-needed transparency by physical structure restructuring, POP materials or individual briefing stress on the use of channels other than mass media advertising which further emphasise the role of integrated marketing communications rather than solely advertising to earn the appreciation for performance.

Post-purchase evaluation
The post-purchase evaluation takes into account the totality of the service experience. After having gone to a salon, the quality of the haircut plus the ambience, the courtesy of the stylist and everything else the customer experienced while being at the salon become an input in service quality evaluation.

The task of marketing a service product is doubtlessly a formidable one because it is multi-faceted and most of its outcomes are incorporeal and impalpable. As a result of this pitfall, branding was never really an integral part of the culture of the service firms until recently when it became an obligatory factor to help the market players emerge as a survivor in the present-day tussle for existence. Thus, while the problem of intangibility can be handled differently by different strategists, judicious positioning, branding and effective communication of the core values of the ethereal service product aided by a dash of sensible tangibilisation ought to be the focus of the service peddlers.

The above article has been condensed/abstracted from the following books/articles and all their right are reserved.
* Service An approach to branding services, Moorthi, YLR, Journal of Service Marketing, Vol 16, Issue 3, 2002
* Service Service Marketing, Zeithaml, Valarie A. and Bitner, Maru Jo, McGraw-Hill International Editions, 1996
* Service Services Communications: from mindless tangibilization to meaningful messages, Mittal, Banwari, Journal of Service Marketing, Vol 16, Issue 5, 2002
* Service Addressing service’s intangibility through integrated marketing communication: an exploratory study, Grove, Stephen J., Carlson, Les and Dorsch, Michael J., Vol 16, Issue 5, 2002.