Marketing of Services: Challenges & Opportunities in Today’s Global Competitive Business Environment

Abstract

Service is any act or performance that one party offers to another that is essentially intangible and does not result in any ownership. The majorities of the challenges in service marketing arises from the basic characteristics of services like intangibility, heterogeneity, inseparability and perishability and are constantly known as IHIP. These characteristics have been staples of service research for more than two decades. All of these characteristics poses specific challenges and requires explicit strategies. This paper presents a conceptual frame work summarizing the exclusive characteristics of services, the challenges occurs from these characteristics and strategies suggested as appropriate to conquer the issues. Today almost every service organization is facing the marketing challenges in global business environment due to the basic characteristics of services. In spite of the fact that various studies have been conducted in the area of services marketing, there is a great need to further authenticate different models and recommendations due to considerable changes in business environment. Most of the studies focus on comparing differences in buyer characteristics and only few compare how goods and services relate to their markets based on these differences. Even the literature, providing marketing implication arising out of the goods-services distinction and suggesting marketing strategies, suffers from certain drawbacks. The services marketing literature doesn‘t uncover the most critical problems facing most service firms today. This paper is a pure academic attempt to uncover these critical problems faced by many firm today.