Distinctive Characteristics of Services
Researchers delineate four key characteristics that distinguish services from products: intangibility, inseparability, variability, and perishability.6 Understanding these unique aspects of service delivery is important, because they can greatly affect the design of marketing programs. We discuss these four aspects of services in more detail next.
Intangibility
Unlike physical products, services cannot be seen, tasted, felt, heard, or smelled before they are bought. A person getting cosmetic surgery cannot see the results beforehand, and the patient in the psychiatrist’s office cannot know the exact outcome of treatment. To reduce uncertainty, buyers will look for evidence of quality by drawing inferences ...
Get Marketing Management, 16th Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
