A Customer-oriented Manager for B2B Services

2Reality and Challenges of Service

2.1. Economy and service: from data to discourse

Service dominates the economies of developed countries and plays a major role in development. While economic analysis strongly emphasizes the weight of service in our economies, interpretations of this reality are far from consensual.

2.1.1. The economic weight of service

2.1.1.1. Service in general

The work of the British economist Colin Clark in the 1940s, taken up by the Frenchman Jean Fourastié, proposed classifying the economy into three sectors: the primary sector, the secondary sector and the tertiary sector¹. This classification is the basis for our national accounts and INSEE today. But it must be recognized that service activities cannot be confined to the tertiary sector alone. If we look more closely at the activities of companies belonging to the first two economic sectors, we find two other types of service activities:

• – internally deployed services such as research and development or the corporate university;
• – services that the company combines with its products in order to position itself more advantageously in its markets or to benefit from additional financial income. The car manufacturer has long offered financing and after-sales services. The winegrower is increasingly interested in new activities such as wine tasting, cellar tours and the creation of an art center.

Without even including this tertiarization of the primary and secondary sectors, the tertiary sector has ...