Services Marketing, Text and Readings

Citation

Michelsen, C. (2002), "Services Marketing, Text and Readings", International Journal of Service Industry Management, Vol. 13 No. 2, pp. 205-208. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijsim.2002.13.2.205.2

A total of 21 articles organized in five parts with a sense of proportion, a flair for theoretic evolution and keen awareness of the need for critical viewpoints as articles both pro and con are often selected, sometimes even capped by an integrating view. At the beginning of each of the five parts, the authors present a very well thought out synthesis of the writings that follow, with many intelligent insights, interspaced with references to earlier works, and to their own original contributions.

The Preface by the authors points to the significant growth in the services sector, and its potential as an economic development engine, but does not document exactly when such growth took off or why it did at all. Census data from many developed countries suggest that the point of inflection occurred as early as the late 1950s when employment in services surpassed employment in industry, which started to decline in proportion to the total labour force, although at the same time starting to gallop in productivity and capital investment. On the other hand, in many developing nations where industry never really played, and will never play, a major role, the growth of services may be the only growth option to be expected at all, beyond agriculture and the massive production of ever less valued raw materials, making Carson and Gilmore’s collection a rich source for a growth manifesto. They correctly indicate that services are not a capital intensive pursuit, arguing that it is a management intensive strategy. One wonders, though, which scarce resource is more difficult to find and indeed, allocate, and whether such scarce managerial resources are better rewarded in controlled and legal tax paying endeavours, or in covert, but open, informal “black economy” outfits which populate tertiary sectors of all underdeveloped economies, now with global links, creating instead a management intensive tragedy. In such environments, only one third of all bank notes pass through formal banks, and less than a fifth of all organisations actually pay taxes, making black cash and outright evasion the norm rather than the exception.

Regarding why services suddenly started growing so significantly there are few suggestions in the book except for the first article by William J. Regan, who argues that it depended on “more consideration allocated to the expansion of service technologies” suggesting that the beginning of the post industrial stage was also the massification of services, much later than predicted by Rostow’s (1960) famous Stages of Economic Growth. The wave of productivity which made industry grow while using less labour must have also had an impact on services, with their very different factor structure. Management techniques were the same then, but profit opportunities were certainly greater in services. Barzel (1969) while studying the productivity of medical services in the USA, noted that in the late 1960s “The cost of labour input to the medical industry increased more slowly than that for the entire economy … The average annual earnings per full‐time employee tripled for the entire economy and only doubled for medical services”. Faced with the same cost of capital, and using the same managerial techniques as industry, but with a cheaper cost of labour, services had nowhere to go but upwards. This would be the supply side of the story. The shift from household “internal” transactions to external transactions, provoked not so much by higher income, but by time’s inelasticity and smaller families, would explain the demand side of the equation in services growth.

Rather than setting the stage for a service explosion, the early strata are patiently revealed in Part I, “The origins of aervices marketing”, with four articles spanning 20 years of thought, from 1963 through 1983. Tracing back literature allows, as the authors assert, “establishing tracks and trends”. This is excellent for lecturers, who often find so much taken for granted in current writings that they are forced to detour awkwardly back to the sources. It enriches many libraries, specially in less developed countries which do not keep dated journals. In mine, for example, the world begins in 1980. Many electronic libraries do the same; and students also learn that “old” writings carry as much truth value as the latest article. The introduction to Part I, for example, lists 13 marketing characteristics of services found by a writer after reading the first of the articles in the book. The closing article in Part I becomes a veritable portico for a new field of endeavour, for its title is actually emblematic of a liberating era to come: “Breaking free from product marketing” by Lynn Shostack. Lynn’s article has been of great use in class many times for it demonstrates the uselessness of systems flow charting symbols, so often used for services, or those applicable to time and motion studies, which remain at factory level, where they must.

Part II, “The establishment of the services marketing domain” includes three articles, by K.J. Blois, Christian Gronroos, and “Parsus”’s friends Valerie and Len Berry, all three classic boundary‐defining contributions. Focused on managerial aspects of service quality, Part III is aptly entitled “The Consolidation and management of service quality” and includes another article by Lynn Shostack, the strategic classifications article by Lovelock, the anti‐marketing department diatribe of Gronroos, a premonitory broadside heralding the current “marketing is a line function in services” position, and Heskett’s (1987), “Lessons from the service sector” article addressed to non‐service organizations. Carson and Gilmore diagnose that it was at this stage that the three Ps view (people, process, physical environment) probably emerged in force. Gummeson’s article on part‐time marketers, is relevant in itself for being one of the first to use the servuction idea, delving on specific recommendations of organizational design, and on how to integrate TQM efforts.

In Part IV, “The functional aspects of services marketing”, instead of the new three Ps Carson and Gilmore offer more traditional fare, beginning with a “product” article by Swan and Combs, followed by the excellent Mary Jo Bitner article on servicescapes my students adore, George and Berry’s thoughtful guidelines for advertising in services, and closing with Christopher’s article on strategies for marketing and customer service.

Part V looks ahead on the future of services marketing from the point of view of five excellent writers, including the authors themselves. Glynn and Lehtinen actually return freshly to the exchange concept as an integrative approach, while Liljander and Strandvik open new ground on the nature of relationship quality. The book closes with Gronroos’ article defining marketing.

The choice of articles is well balanced: both sides of the Atlantic are carefully represented, even though leadership in the field began and still resides in Eastern shores. Yet after reviewing the book the impression grows that services marketing arose as a sharp wedge driven into the heart of older fields, but remains quite afraid to look sideways. Many of the omissions attest to this feeling. Shostack’s articles should have been laced with at least a reference to the classic studies of the restaurant industry, notably the memorable study by William F. Whyte, and especially his incisive description of the role of that mechanical wonder, the spindle, as a cushioning mediator between high status kitchen staff and low status part‐timers in waiting. The study of hospitals, and indeed prisons, is an old area of research in sociology and organization Theory full of internal marketing incidents. The recent contingency view of organisations accommodates perfectly with the marketing of services with its emphasis on external turbulence and uncertainty and internal differentiation and integration.

The one major omission is the pioneering work of W. Earl Sasser from Harvard whose early 1976 article published in Business Horizons is cited and commented at excessive speed and which certainly had greater merit than a number of the articles included. Back in the early 1970s while teaching in Mexico, I joined Professor Sasser in ultra‐conservative Colombia, as consultants trying to fit the then available marketing concepts, all from packaged goods, to a new family planning outfit sponsored by American foreign aid. We were aghast at the incongruence and had to swiftly invent an ad hoc approach. Professor Sasser has written many articles and a major book on the management of services, and his many students have contributed to the field. Only one of them, James Heskett, is included in this review. In all fairness, however, Carson and Gilmore have performed a great service to students and faculty in assembling, under one highly congruent view, all the various loose ends of a new field of research.