Marketing Services

Position Paper 4

Name: Leonardo Paiva de Souza.

218437

        

        Services are “Acts or performances that one part can offer to another that is essentially intangible and does not result in the ownership of anything.”, as Kotler says. In fact, they are something very and strongly different from Products in Many ways. Although the objective of both is to fulfill and satisfy a need, they act in different perpectives. You can’t “see” the service, or smell it, or taste it, or touch it. You can only experience it and make your conclusions about what you have just received. If it satisfied and fulfilled your needs or not. The way the service is delivered to the customer creates a lot of impressions and opinions about the service, which can help, or not, in the Brand’s Marketing Strategy. The companies have also to worry about the way that their employees work, because they are the ones that will get in touch with the customer, and they are the ones that are going to make the difference in the customer satisfaction.

        

        The Blue ocean strategy consists in the pursuit of differentiation and low costs to open new market spaces and create new demands to fulfill a need that hasn’t been explored or fulfilled. Using this idea to services, it’s not very easy to create something that you don’t have anything very similar in the market. But, when you have an idea that fit in this objective, your chances to successful can be very high. Cirque du Solei, as Kotler uses for example, is a very good example of this point. You didn’t have, and you still don’t have, anything similar to Cirque du Soleil in the market. They are unique. And the experience that they provide is almost impossible to copy and to compete against them, because they have a very consolidated market and the experience that they provide is very well known around the world.

        

        Quality is one of the most important points when talking about services. You can provide a very good and innovative service, but if you don’t do this with a high quality, a competitor can get your idea and make it in a better way, so you can lose your customers because of this. Using the example of Dell, where I work, we are well known because of the services that we provide to our customers. More than machines and IT hardware, we provide a solution to them. We offer a very complete suite of services that, combined with the hardware that we sell, can fulfill a lot of the needs of our customers, and give them a security about their Technology infrastructure.

        Customization is another point that is very necessary nowadays. Companies have to have the ability to customize and provide services that fulfill the very specific needs that a company can have. The services provider has to understand the reality of the company and see options to make the necessary customizations in the services that they will deliver to the customer. This way, you are providing something that other may not do, the satisfaction and the felling that your customer is unique and that you care about their specificities.

 

1. How can companies create customized services and, at the same time, get a got margin without charging the customer a lot more.
2. What companies need to do to compete in a market where the services are being delivered in a customized way?
3. How can you provide training to your customers to make them able to provide a better service without losing margin?