Today, many of the articles in the important journals in the marketing field as well as many presentations at marketing conferences are about services market-ing. Twenty-five years ago, however, services marketing played only a minor role in marketing academia, even though initial works on services marketing appeared around 1960. In the following, we give a short overview of the emer-gence and development of services marketing in academia in order to outline the topics that are discussed in the field and make up part of this book, as well as to understand the research questions that are currently being addressed. It is pos-sible to differentiate between five corresponding developmental stages of services marketing research chronologically (see Figure 1.2).
• Perceived service value
• Customer value and equity
• Process orientation
• Service productivity
• Service factors
• Service engineering
• Service quality concept
• Service quality measurement
• Managing service quality
• Frameworks for services marketing
• Services marketing mix
• Service-related marketing concepts
• Relevance of services
• Differences to goods
• Service definition
Service definition
1965
Services marketing
concepts
Service quality
Service production
Service value
1975 1985 1995 Today
FIGURE 1.2 Developmental stages of services marketing
1960s: Service definition (definitional focus). The first publications in the field of services marketing dealt with the concept of a ‘service’. Topics in this stage of aca-demic research were focused upon the relevance of services, their differences to goods and the constitutional definition of services.2Regarding the relevance of services, authors discussed above all the increasing proportions of services within the economic statistics.3Often, this development was called the ‘service revolu-tion’.4Furthermore, the differences between services and goods were outlined.
Although this topic has been discussed in later developmental stages as well, the foundations of the services-versus-goods discussion can be traced back to this first stage of services marketing research. Based on these differences, first defini-tions of a service were proposed.5An important characteristic of services is the process character of a service. The main benefit of a service is created through the service process when provider and customer meet (e.g. for food services, the restaurateur serves the customer at the restaurant; or the patient seeks medical services at the doctor’s practice). This process character is a basic idea in services marketing and will be elaborated on later in this chapter.
1970s: Services marketing concepts (conceptual focus). In this stage of services market-ing research the focus was shifted to developmarket-ing concepts for services marketmarket-ing.
This stage reached its climax in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The research concen-trated on translating the differences of services compared to goods into service-specific marketing concepts. It was argued that in service industries the marketing concept had not been established because ‘marketing offers no guid-ance, terminology, or practical rules that are clearly relevant to services’.6This conceptual focus resulted in the definition of services marketing frameworks.7 Furthermore, service typologies were used to derive strategic emphases depending on the service type. Another stream of research focused on the marketing mix of service corporations, either by applying the marketing mix concept to services comprehensively8or by specifying certain marketing mix elements for services, e.g.
distribution channels for services.9Finally, in this stage ‘new’ marketing concepts arose based on the services marketing themes, such as relationship marketing.10 1980s: Service quality (measurement focus). In the following stage of services mar-keting development, the concept of service quality emerged as a major challenge for service companies. Because of the characteristics of services, especially the encounter of provider and customer in the service process, service quality is a more complex construct than product quality. The characteristics of service qual-ity are not objective, but subjective for each customer. As a consequence, major efforts were undertaken to conceptualise service quality. The best-known model in this context is the so-called GAP model of service quality that explains the determination of service quality as the gap between service expectations and per-ceptions by four internal gaps.11 Based on the conceptual considerations regarding service quality, further research put emphasis on the development of instruments to measure service quality. The widely known and discussed meas-urement instrument based on the GAP model is the SERVQUAL approach that
measures service quality using 22 items that are associated with the five service quality dimensions: tangibles, reliability, responsiveness, assurance and empathy.12Other researchers stressed the service encounter as the focal source of service quality13– the so-called ‘moments of truth’.14This philosophy resulted in the emergence of even more service-specific measurement approaches, such as the critical incident technique15or the service blueprinting approach.16A further area in this stream of research dealt with the management of service quality.
Respective research emphases were the development of concepts for managing service quality and the identification of drivers of service quality.17The evalua-tion of service quality management from a controlling perspective, namely the determination of a return on quality was also taken into account.18
1990s: Service production (operational focus). The increasing profitability and cost orientation in the 1990s resulted in a more systematic look into service produc-tion. The starting point was the analysis of service productivity19by examining input–output relations of the service production process. Consequently this research involved an analysis of service factors and opportunities to improve pro-ductivity as well as the effectiveness of service production by managing these factors. Major topics in this area were service technology,20service employees and the internal marketing concept.21In addition, the concept of customer integration that dealt with the efficient and effective integration of the customer into the serv-ice production process (i.e. managing the customer participation) was part of academic research. This production-oriented approach was also applied to new services by developing concepts for service design and engineering.22
Today: Service value (process focus). In recent years – in accordance with the increas-ing relevance of value in general management – research in services marketincreas-ing has been focusing on the value contribution of services. One area of research in this field of services marketing academia is the perceived service value concept, i.e. the analysis of the value that is created by a service company for the customer through the eyes of the customer.23While this research takes on the perspective of the customer, studies on customer value and customer equity analyse value cre-ation from the firm’s perspective.24 Customer value is the value that is contributed to the overall firm’s value by a single customer relationship, while customer equity is the value that is created by the whole customer base. Recently, research has questioned how these values can be managed actively by service firms by asking what service processes contribute to value creation. This process orientation is primarily a focus of current services research.25
Comparing the developments in management practice of service companies and research in services academia, we observe a recent tendency towards a value ori-entation. This orientation is the guideline for our value-oriented services marketing approach that we present later in this chapter. Before this, we will con-sider the nature of services because – as outlined above – the characteristics of services have an impact on the processes of a service firm.