Services Marketing

Services marketing is a sub field of marketing, which can be split into the two main areas of goods marketing (which includes the marketing of fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) and durables) and services marketing. Services marketing typically refers to both business to consumer (B2C) and business to business (B2B) services, and includes marketing of services like telecommunications services, financial services, all types of hospitality services, car rental services, air travel, health care services and professional services. The range of approaches and expressions of a marketing idea developed with the hope that it be effective in conveying the ideas to the diverse population of people who receive it.

Services are economic activities offered by one party to another. Often time-based, performances bring about desired results to recipients, objects, or other assets for which purchasers have responsibility. In exchange for money, time, and effort, service customers expect value from access to goods, labor, professional skills, facilities, networks, and systems; but they do not normally take ownership of any of the physical elements involved.

There has been a long academic debate on what makes services different from goods. The historical perspective in the late-eighteen and early-nineteenth centuries focused on creation and possession of wealth. Classical economists contended that goods were objects of value over which ownership rights could be established and exchanged. Ownership implied tangible possession of an object that had been acquired through purchase, barter or gift from the producer or previous owner and was legally identifiable as the property of the current owner.

Adam Smith’s famous book, The Wealth of Nations, published in Great Britain in 1776, distinguished between the outputs of what he termed “productive” and “unproductive” labor. The former, he stated, produced goods that could be stored after production and subsequently exchanged for money or other items of value. But unproductive labor, however” honorable,...useful, or... necessary” created services that perished at the time of production and therefore didn’t contribute to wealth. Building on this theme, French economist Jean-Baptiste Say argued that production and consumption were inseparable in services, coining the term “immaterial products” to describe them.