Research paper service marketing

Research paper service marketing

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WebMarketing inclusive banking services to financially vulnerable consumers: a service design approach Isaac Ofori-Okyere, Farag Edghiem, Seyram Pearl Kumah To explore how WebResearch Papers on Marketing. No doubt, marketing is an interesting field. It includes activities and strategies to make products and services that will satisfy customers while WebOct 11,  · Research papers deal with specific fields of marketing, strategies, case studies, and unique situations. As a student, you can leverage your research paper WebMarketing Culture Global Market Demand Production Exposure 3 Pages Good Research Paper On Strategy Choice Analysis of Strategy Choice: AT & T and Sprint Nextel In WebBecause of the peculiarities of the services, there are many critical success factors in services marketing: (a) service industrialization, (b) strategic image management, (c) ... read more

However, the service or frontline employees interacting with customers in the service production process are employed in other non-marketing business functions. Primarily their job is to make sure that the process functions well from a technical point of view. However, as part-time marketers , to use a term introduced by Gummesson , they fulfill a key marketing function when interacting with customers. As Gummesson also notes, there normally are many more part-time marketers than full-time marketers, and they meet customers at the very point of service production and consumption.

In creating customer satisfaction and loyalty, and in generating resales, their role is critical. To make sure that the part-time marketers are prepared and willing to fulfill their role in the promise-keeping part of the total marketing process, activities and processes labeled internal marketing Grönroos, in the service literature are needed. Through internal marketing, it is assured that promises can be made and kept successfully, such that customers buy and become satisfied with what they have bought. This is promise-enabling. In an article published in , I draw guidelines for the development of marketing and suggest an overarching marketing definition based on the promise management approach:.

These guidelines point out that, when conceptualizing service marketing, one needs to distinguish between those resources and activities that take responsibility for making promises and those that take responsibility for keeping promises. The former resources are probably mainly full-time marketers, whereas the latter are part-time marketers as well as other resources and systems — physical and digital — that the customers interact with or are exposed to in some other way. The servuction, molecular, interactive marketing and 7P models of the early days of service research include such resources as well as processes active in such interactions in various ways. In addition, the role of the customers themselves as a resource in service marketing is emphasized in some of these models and in early service research.

Furthermore, the promise management definition emphasizes that promises made create individual expectations among customers and that those responsible for marketing in the promise-keeping phase must be prepared to take this into account when interacting with customers. This is part of internal marketing as the promise-enabling process. The promise management guideline and overarching definition offer many opportunities for service researchers to conceptualize service marketing and develop more detailed models of service marketing and, for example, of the various sub-processes of promise management. Conventional marketing thought assumes that marketing is a separate function frequently managed by a marketing department. As Wilkie , p. An obvious conclusion is that marketing can only be partly organized Grönroos, The promise-making process can in most cases be organized in a separate department, but the promise-keeping process is spread throughout the organization.

Therefore, it cannot be organized in any conventional structures. Instead, in the context of promise-keeping, marketing must be instilled as a customer-focused mindset Grönroos, Instilling this mindset demands internal marketing efforts. How to ensure that marketing functions well in the promise-keeping sub-process without organizing it offers an abundance of important and interesting research opportunities. However, this requires that researchers move out of their comfort zone of studying marketing issues through traditional lenses. As Webster , p. It is a matter of something much larger than getting out into the market. Employees who have different background and training easily find marketing inherently unacceptable and resist being part of it.

In , I suggested that dropping the term may serve the introduction of marketing into service firms better than using it Grönroos, Twenty years later, this suggestion still seems to be too controversial to be picked up in any serious research into marketing. However, in the discussion of a renaissance for marketing, Sheth and Sisodia , p. Product is a key marketing variable in the conventional 4P model. Without an understanding of the product to be marketed, successful product marketing outcomes cannot be expected.

This is, of course, also true for service marketing. How can the object to be marketed be understood and conceptualized in the context of services? This is critical for other research areas besides marketing within the service domain as well. For example, innovation, design, branding and transformative service have drawn extensive attention from service researchers. The Journal of Service Research has published special issues on service design February and transformative service research August The articles published in these issues develop new thoughts, concepts and models largely based on an understanding of customers and their processes, which, of course, is important. However, what also is important is an explicit understanding of what constitutes the service that is innovated, designed and branded, and which the customers purchase and consume.

Models or conceptualizations or even discussions of this are lacking. In an overview article of service innovation, Helkkula et al. Here, too, service as an object of innovation is not explicitly present. Given the amount of research on the many subfields of service that has been published, it is, in my view, worrying that there is no clear model or models of service as an object or offering to be produced, marketed and consumed. This object is a process Edvardsson et al. However, what features or elements constitute this object? In the s and s, some publications on service included observations about service offerings. It was noted that they included two types of services — namely, core and auxiliary services Normann, — as part of a service package Sasser et al.

In the context of their servuction model, Langeard and Eiglier discuss an offering system. In the context of service development, Edvardsson made the point that customers have what he termed primary needs, which are fulfilled by a set of core and auxiliary service elements — such as guest rooms, booking, check-in service, and breakfast service in a hotel context — and secondary needs, which relate to how these services function as processes. This augmentation makes the service process part of the service offering. Later, in the context of digital services, together with Kristina Heinonen and other colleagues Grönroos et al.

In the same conference paper, I also emphasized that auxiliary services added to a core service lodging, in the hotel example in a service package are of a different nature and fulfill different purposes. For example, booking and check-in services in the hotel example are mandatory services. If they are missing or not accessible, the customer cannot use the core service. However, breakfast service is not mandatory in the same sense. The purpose of such a service is to enhance the service offering, whereas the purpose of the former types of services is to enable the use of the core service. Hence, for the understanding of the service package, it is important to distinguish between the core service, offering-enabling services and offering-enhancing services Grönroos, ; terminology as in Grönroos, When developing a model of service offering — that is, of services as objects for production, marketing and consumption — a critical starting point is that services are not product-like objects but processes that lead to an outcome.

To fulfill primary needs, the service model must include service elements, such as guest rooms and booking, check-in and breakfast services in the hotel example used earlier. To fulfill secondary needs, the service model must also include process-related aspects of the service, which guarantee that the service elements function in a customer-focused manner. The service elements form the service package, but this package is not the service as an object or offering. In perceived service quality terms Grönroos, , they ensure that the technical outcome quality can be delivered. The role of the process-related aspects is to guarantee that the service elements of the service package also function in a desired manner, such that a satisfying service emerges.

In perceived service quality terms, they ensure that the functional process quality requirement is achieved. When conceptualizing services, however it is done, both service package elements and service process-related aspects must be included. When developing the elements of the service package, it is also essential to observe that they may fulfill different purposes, such as mandatory elements enabling the use of the core service and optional elements enhancing the perception of the service. Most service elements can be both enabling and enhancing. To use a car rental example Grönroos and Sand, , the core service is transportation by a rented vehicle.

Access to a wanted vehicle is a purely enabling service element, whereas, for example, the reservation system, information about terms and conditions, vehicle return system and payment system can be both enabling and enhancing service elements. Complaints handling and service recovery are examples of purely enhancing service elements. In my model, I proposed that accessibility, interaction and customer participation variables are used to augment the service package and cover the process-related aspect of services Grönroos, ; and in study, my colleagues and I suggested that information and customer participation variables can be used to conceptualize the augmentation of digital services Grönroos et al.

These are only research-based examples from the literature of ways of conceptualizing the service package and of augmenting the elements of this package. However, regardless of how models of services as objects or offerings are conceptualized, both service elements and the process-related augmentation of such elements need to be taken into account. In the present article, I have made the point that marketing and service as objects of marketing or offerings are neglected research topics within the domain of service marketing and that these topics should be highly prioritized in service research.

This does not mean that other suggested research priorities are less important — on the contrary. However, the need to study service and marketing again has not been voiced for decades. Moreover, service and marketing form the very foundation of our domain, and without proper understanding of them, the development of other current and future service topics may generate less valid results. Berry , L. and Upah , G. Eds , Emerging Perspectives in Services Marketing , American Marketing Association , Chicago, IL , pp.

At the start of the twenty-first century, services marketing is very important in the developed countries, because of the relevance of services in terms of GNP, employment, etc. There will be an increasing amount of one-to-one marketing, which is particularly suitable for services. Another important development will concern the internationalization of services e. Sales of products now often include the offer of some services, as, for example, in the automotive industry, where this is represented by the after sales service, a very important aspect affecting the buyer decision process.

Offers such as this are the key issues that, in most cases, actually make the difference, given the fact that the basic product is very frequently similar to other products, and the difference is provided by the service included in the product. Research Paper Examples. Other Sample Research Papers. Services Marketing Research Paper. ORDER HIGH QUALITY CUSTOM PAPER Always on-time. FREE INQUIRY. ORDER NOW. Special offer! Promo code: cd1a Issue 7 Broadening and Reinvigorating the Service Discipline to Reduce Human Suffering and Improve Well-Being. Issue 6 Issue 5 Issue 4 Opportunities in the new service marketplace. Issue 3 Issue 2 Issue 1 Mirror, mirror on the wall! Issue 9 Open Access Issue. Issue 7 Expanding service research in the MEA Middle East and Africa region.

Issue 6 Solving Marketplace problems consumers experiencing vulnerabilities. Issue 4 Issue 1 Transition: service research opportunities for an aging society. Issue 7 Issue 3 Service Research: A Critical Review and New Perspectives. Issue 1 Advancing Qualitative Research Methodology in Service Research. Issue 6 Transformative Services Research and Social Marketing. Issue 4 Future Service Technologies: Business models, Analytics, and Experience. Issue 1 Issue 5 Challenges and Opportunities for Services Marketers in a Culturally Diverse Global Marketplace.

Issue 1 Customer Engagement in Service Innovation: Theoretical and Empirical Advancements. Issue 1 Relationship Marketing - Past, Present and Future. Issue 7 Anatomy of services branding. Issue 6 The dark side of customer service. Issue 5 Call centre services. Issue 6 Internationalization of services. Issue 5 Business to business services multiple markets and multidisciplinary perspectives for the twentyfirst century. Issue 5 Service recovery and service continuity. Issue 3 Cultural perspectives on services marketing. The role of market-based transformative service initiatives in service inclusion of refugees Hossein Eslami , Sertan Kabadayi , Alcheikh Edmond Kozah This paper aims to empirically investigate the role of market-based transformative service initiatives TSIs during the refugee crisis and shed light on how such TSIs….

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This paper aims to emphasize two key research priorities central to the domain of service marketing. Reflections based on conceptual analysis of the current level of knowledge of service as an offering and of the nature of service marketing in the literature. It is observed that research into marketing and into service as an object of marketing, or as an offering, has been neglected for two decades and more. It is also shown that to restore its credibility, marketing needs to be reinvented. Furthermore, the point is made that if a proper understanding of service as an object of, for example, innovation, design, branding and development is lacking, or even only implicitly present, valid research into those and other important topics is at risk.

This paper discusses two neglected topics within the domain of service research. Other important areas of future research are not covered. However, the paper offers directions for service marketing research fundamental to the development of the discipline. In earlier discussions of service and service marketing research priorities, the observation that service and marketing are neglected topics that need to be studied and further developed has not been made. The paper emphasizes that service marketing research also needs to return to its roots and suggests possible directions for future research. Grönroos, C. Copyright © , Christian Grönroos. Published by Emerald Publishing Limited.

This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 4. The purpose of this paper is to discuss two neglected but central topics within the domain of service marketing that, in my view, need urgent attention in service research. Because these topics are of such fundamental importance to the understanding of service marketing, I consider them just as important, if not more important, as any of the significant service research priorities that have been suggested in the literature. These topics are service and marketing. First, I discuss the research into these topics that exist, and then I suggest directions that, in my view, would enable further fruitful research into these topics. Service innovation and design, transformative service research, service branding, accountability, service logic, digitalization and other topics have been suggested as important research priorities Ostrom et al.

These are, of course, central research topics in the field of service marketing today. However, there are two more fundamental aspects of service marketing that have been neglected in service marketing research and where solid service-focused models are missing, namely, service and marketing. Rathmell , p. He also observed that service firms do not have one contact point with their customers covered by conventional marketing, but two — namely, marketing and production. Three years after Rathmell, Shostack , p. Can corporate banking really be marketed according to the same basic blueprint that made Tide a success?

My question is, how far has research into service marketing reached since these early days of modern service research? The sad answer is that it has not reached very far. Again, my question is, how far has research into service as an object of marketing or as an offering reached since those early days of service research? Again, the answer is equally saddening. During the past 15 years, service as a phenomenon has been discussed as part of the research into service as logic Vargo and Lusch, ; Grönroos, However, since the s and s, very little has been published on service as an offering — that is, as an object to be innovated, developed, designed, produced, delivered and marketed.

Studies on innovation, design and development of services are abundant, but the object of such research is seldom discussed and specified explicitly. As marketing has been a driving force of modern service research and its dominating subareas, the conceptual development of service marketing should be a central research priority. As marketing of services cannot be understood conceptually without an understanding of what service as an object of marketing consists of, conceptual development of service as an offering or an object to be marketed should be another self-evident research priority in service research.

Service and marketing are so central to service research that I will focus on them in the present article. First, marketing will be discussed and then service. In the early days of modern service research, several conceptual models of service marketing were developed. In addition, Berry introduced the idea of relationship marketing , emphasizing the long-term timeframe of service marketing. of service marketing. The molecular model includes elements of both the first and second schools. These models are genuinely geared toward characteristics of service firms, predominantly the process nature of services and the impact of interactions between providers and customers, but they are based on somewhat different approaches.

Basically, this model is a decision category model, but it includes process as one of the new service-specific decision-making categories. The molecular model emphasizes that to market services successfully, a number of other resources and processes influencing customers have to be taken into account in addition to conventional marketing activities. In various ways, all these models go beyond conventional models by including aspects related to service production and interactions between customers and service providers. As shown in Berry and Parasuraman , there were a large number of publications on service marketing in the s and s Zeithaml et al.

Then service research turned to other topics. At the same time as this explosion of service quality studies took place in the late s and s Cronin and Taylor, ; Boulding et al. Why did this happen? In my view, service marketing requires genuinely new approaches, which did not fit the conventional and dominating marketing mix management paradigm and kept researchers from continuing the studies of marketing in service firms. The conventional paradigm offered a too-heavy straitjacket to allow for boundary-spanning research approaches. Without putting it into a marketing framework and without having to move marketing as marketing into inconvenient directions geared to the characteristics of service, the production and interaction-related aspects could still be studied, but in a service quality domain.

Whether this happened consciously or unconsciously can be debated. Everything was a mistake Grönroos, In reality, I was interested in how customers perceive service as an offering or object of consumption. I was looking at the features of service offerings that customers perceived and appreciated as a starting point for further research on how to conceptualize service as an object of production, delivery and marketing. Once the fast-spreading interest in service quality research occurred and I was, of course, not its only initiator , it was too late to stop it. And service quality research did offer new insights into quality; for example, the observation that quality is not what firms produce and offer, but what customers perceive.

In conclusion, instead of exploring the nature of marketing in service firms and developing models of service marketing further, the service research community devoted itself to studying other service-related topics. Service quality was especially the topic of interest, as I understand it, as a surrogate for studying marketing issues directly, where researchers did not have to challenge the steadfast grip of the conventional marketing mix management view. As I said before, perceived service quality relates directly to the aspects of the servuction, molecular, interactive marketing and 7P models unique to service. When the interest in service quality faded away toward the end of the s, with the new focus on service as a perspective or logic on business and marketing, value and how value is created and co-created became key topics in service research Vargo and Lusch, ; Grönroos, However, the same thing as with service quality happened.

This field of research exploded and, although it has been claimed that it is about a new logic for marketing, attempts to conceptualize marketing are largely lacking. At the same time, other topics of importance, such as design, innovation, customer experience, customer engagement, transformative service, service branding and digitalization have also drawn the attention of the research community. In none of these areas has conceptualizing marketing been of central interest. An absolute key research priority in service research is to finally continue the research into service marketing that took place in the early days of modern research into the service field. Unless a valid and acceptable model or models of marketing relevant to service is developed and found useful, none of the advances made in designing, innovating and digitalizing services, to mention just a few topics, can be fully used, or used at all.

Marketing has to reinvent itself. Its credibility and use in firms has been in decline for a long time. In the same section, these observations are reinforced by Sheth and Sisodia , p. Since then, the development of digitalization has strengthened the position of the customers, but the conventional marketing models have had difficulties handling this. The observations presented above should be taken seriously. Moreover, employees other than the marketers are responsible for keeping customers and, therefore, for making customers feel satisfied with how the firm serves them and also for their continued patronage to the firm. So far, neither service researchers nor marketing scholars, in general, have reacted.

As a consequence, marketing continuously becomes less relevant to firms and top management, and only tactical, if anything, and marketing as an academic discipline loses credibility as part of the management and business administration field. Conceptualizing marketing should be founded on this requirement. Furthermore, marketing is a process that includes many elements, such as creating interest in the firm and its offerings, making customers who have bought the offerings feel satisfied with them and creating enduring relationships with customers. In a service context, the offering, the service that is consumed, is a process and to a varying degree, it emerges in interactions between the service provider and the customer.

Moreover, as emphasized by customer-dominant logic, the customer puts offerings into their customer ecosystems and, based on that, they determine the importance and value to them of such offerings Heinonen and Strandvik, All this needs to be incorporated in attempts to conceptualize service marketing. For me, promise theory , already introduced in marketing in the s by Calonius , offers solid ground to build upon. As Bitner , p. This simply means that marketers should make promises to their customers that can be kept and then keep these promises, thereby fulfilling the expectations among customers created by the promises made. Developing marketing models based on promise theory requires that marketing is conceptualized as a promise management process, where making and keeping promises are integrated.

Instead of being a rather static marketing conceptualization based on decision categories, such as the 4P model, this would be a dynamic marketing-as-a-process conceptualization. The 4P model includes the product variable, which is clearly thought to fulfill the promise-keeping requirement. The problem is that the promise-keeping capacity of the product variable is only inherent in the model, and not explicitly emphasized or even pointed out. Furthermore, as the product is frequently given to the marketers, the promotion, price and place variables of the model take over, and they are all geared toward promise-making. As a conclusion, marketing mentally and factually becomes a promise-making issue, where the product is thought to keep promises made more or less automatically.

In a service context, this does not function, because in service there are no products as pre-produced, tangible artifacts. Service is a process-based business Edvardsson et al. This changes things immensely. Promise-keeping cannot be taken for granted anymore. The process that the customers experience must be managed in a customer-focused manner — that is, in a way that has the marketing effect of making the customers satisfied and willing to engage with the firm in the future as well. As the process of keeping promises is outside the immediate responsibility and control of those in the firm who make promises about this process — that is, the full-time marketers — marketing as promise-keeping extends marketing beyond those who, according to conventional marketing models, are considered the marketers.

Marketing as promise management means that three separate processes need to be studied and developed, namely, a process of promise-making, a process of promise-keeping, and, in addition, a process of promise-enabling. In conventional marketing, relying on a marketing department of full-time marketers, those responsible for marketing activities are thought to be marketing professionals. However, the service or frontline employees interacting with customers in the service production process are employed in other non-marketing business functions. Primarily their job is to make sure that the process functions well from a technical point of view.

Journal of Services Marketing,Online date, start – end:

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Models or conceptualizations or even discussions of this are lacking. There will be an increasing amount of one-to-one marketing, which is particularly suitable for services. In the construction of different literature and academic works, people are advices to use citations not only to show the source of their information, but also to show the agreement of their Service innovation and design, transformative service research, service branding, accountability, service logic, digitalization and other topics have been suggested as important research priorities Ostrom et al. Christian Grönroos is a Professor Emeritus of Service and Relationship Marketing at Hanken School of Economics, Finland. Currently, Research paper service marketing is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Italian Automaker, Fiat S, research paper service marketing. Read more Marketing Company Money Customers Banking Business Supply Chain Services Outsourcing Accounts Receivable Entrepreneurial Credit 3 Pages Research Paper On Health Care Spending in the USA Health care spending in USA has been reported to be high than most nations in the world.