Promoting the Interactive Service Experience. Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.9 - 2 Services and Integrated Marketing Communications

Promoting the Interactive Service

Experience

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. 9 - 2

Services and IntegratedMarketing Communications

• Integrated marketing communications refers to the pursuit of a single positioning concept for an organization or its products, which is achieved by planning, coordinating and unifying all its communication devices (Schultz, Tannenbaum, and Lauterborn 1996).


Features vs. Benefits

• Process features and benefits

•Access - location and hours

• Tangibles and intangibles

• Facilities and equipment

• People as part of product


Tangibilizing the Service

• Tangibilizing the service

•making the service more concrete, thus enabling customers to understand it better (Shostack 1977).


The Promotional Mix

• Advertising

• Sales Promotions

• Personal Selling

• Publicity and Public Relations


Advertising the Service

• Advertising Objectives

• Guidelines for Advertising Services

• Enhancing the Vividness of Services Advertising


Guidelines for Advertising Services

• Provide tangible cues.

• Capitalize on word-of-mouth communication.

• Make the service understood.

• Establish advertising continuity.

• Advertise to employees.

• Promise what is possible.


A Vividness Strategy

•An advertising approach for service offerings that uses concrete language, tangible objects, and dramatization techniques to tangibilize the intangible.


Interactive Imagery

• Uses pictorial representations, verbal associations, and letter accentuations that combine an organization's name and its service to establish a strong link between service name and performance in customer minds.


Sales Promotions and Services

• Attract customers.

• Accommodate cyclical demand.

• Enhance customers’ perception of the service.

• Add tangibility.


Source: Adapted from George, William R., J. Patrick Kelly, and Claudia E. Marshall (1983), “Personal Selling of Services,” in Emerging Perspectives on Services Marketing, L.L. Berry, G. L Shostack and G. D. Upah (eds.), Chicago: American Marketing Association, 65-67.

Personal Selling and Services

• Orchestrate the service purchase.

• Facilitate quality assessment.

• Tangibilize the service.

• Emphasize organizational image.

• Use references external to the organization.

• Recognize the importance of all public contact personnel.

• Recognize customer involvement during the service design process.


Publicity and Services

• Service organizations gain tremendously from good publicity.• The best publicity an organization

receives comes from delighted customers.

• Service organizations must have plans in place to overcome or control negative publicity when it occurs.


Promoting Services on the Internet

• The Internet is one of the fastest growing vehicles for services promotion.

• Service organizations can qualify and target narrow segments of customers in novel and interactive ways.


Promoting Services on the Internet (cont’d)

• Advertisements can attract customers to online sources of information regarding service organizations and, in the case of retailing, even carry them to shopping locations.

• Service organization can combine email communication with Internet capabilities to create a powerful combination of promotion and selling.


Personal Selling

• Frontline and other encounter points

• Service delivery and prospecting

• Cross-selling other products/usage levels/patronage

• Establishing realistic expectations and feedback


Word of Mouth

• The overlooked marketing tool

• Ambassadors (customers, employees, and intermediaries)

• Opinion leaders (media and industry figures)

• Stimulate and reward referrals (trial vs. purchase)

• Look for cross-selling opportunities

Documents

Promoting the Interactive Service Experience. Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.9 - 2 Services and Integrated Marketing Communications