08. Products and Services marketing together

The service-dominant logic suggests that the separation between products and services is not a clear one. The ‘servicisation’ of products refers to the relative importance of the service dimension in a given product offering. Thinking in marketing has moved from a strategy that conceives of either a product or a service to one which sees both product and service dimensions in any market offering.

Many products have a service component and many services have product components. Take for example a physical product such as a car. We purchase a car, which provides the service of getting from one place to another. But the car comes with its own need for services such as insurance, finance, repairs and even a petrol station.

The Swedish car manufacturer Volvo has built a service into its cars that alerts the driver if they are falling asleep.

Volvo introduces V2V warning systems on new models across Europe | Traffic Technology Today

What a great service! Another example is a mobile phone provider such as Nokia. The company provides a product (mobile phone handsets) but also a service (networks). Nokia sees itself as a service or solutions provider – ‘connecting people’.

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19. What is a Market?

Traditionally, a “market” was a physical place where buyers and sellers gathered to buy and sell goods. Economists describe a market as a collection of buyers and sellers who transact over a particular product or product class (such as the housing market or the grain market). Five basic markets and their connecting flows are shown in below. Manufacturers go to resource markets (raw material markets, labor markets, money markets), buy resources and turn them into goods and services, and sell finished products to intermediaries, who sell them to consumers. Consumers sell their labor and receive money with which they pay for goods and services. The government collects tax revenues to buy goods from resource, manufacturer, and intermediary markets and uses these goods and services to provide public services. Each nation’s economy, and the global economy, consists of interacting sets of markets linked through exchange processes. Marketers view sellers as the industry and...

22. Business markets

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18. Marketer and prospect

A marketer is someone who seeks a response—attention, a purchase, a vote, a donation—from another party, called the prospect. If two parties are seeking to sell something to each other, we call them both marketers. Marketers are skilled at stimulating demand for their products, but that’s a limited view of what they do. They also seek to influence the level, timing, and composition of demand to meet the organization’s objectives. Eight demand states are possible: 1. Negative demand—Consumers dislike the product and may even pay to avoid it. 2. Nonexistent demand—Consumers may be unaware of or uninterested in the product. 3. Latent demand—Consumers may share a strong need that cannot be satisfied by an existing product. 4. Declining demand—Consumers begin to buy the product less frequently or not at all. 5. Irregular demand—Consumer purchases vary on a seasonal, monthly, weekly, daily, or even hourly basis. 6. Full demand—Consumers are adequately buying all products put int...

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