ServiceFriday: Everything is a Service

The service industry has an extensive history of being perceived as separate from the goods-centered industry. Beginning with the Industrial Revolution, a need arose for marketing built on a goods-centered, manufacturing-based model of business, and since then, scholars have sought to create a subdiscipline for services marketing. This need to separate the two types of marketing is based on four characteristics or “myths” that have been said to distinguish services from goods, but there have been new arguments to suggest that all marketing can be performed similarly through a service-dominant view.

In an article in the Journal of Service Research by scholars Stephen Vargo and Robert Lusch, it is argued that while advancements made in the service marketing field have been extremely beneficial, they could and should be applied to all forms of business marketing in general, rather than the subset of service. Vargo and Lusch address the four myths of service that have led to this perceived need for separation: intangibility, inseparability, heterogeneity, and perishability. However, the authors suggest that meaning can only be found in these characteristics from a manufacturing and product-based perspective and do not truly distinguish services from goods. These characteristics seek to define services mainly as what “tangible goods are not.”

The four characteristics portray what products are apparently defined by and what services lack. Vargo and Lusch state: Intangibility is “lacking the palpable or tactile quality of goods;” heterogeneity is the “inability to standardize the output of services in comparison to goods;” inseparability of production and consumption is “the simultaneous nature of service production and consumption compared with the sequential nature of production, purchase, and consumption that characterizes physical products;” and perishability is “the relative inability to inventory services as compared to goods.” These four characteristics tend to be viewed as obstacles of service that must be overcome by marketing.

However, the authors take a different approach to this notion of marketing. They define service as “the application of specialized competences (skills and knowledge), through deeds, processes, and performances for the benefit of another entity or the entity itself (self-service),” and argue that this is provided through “the provision of tangible goods,” which are “distribution mechanisms for service provision.” This offers a completely different way of looking at marketing, a more inclusive one for all products and services. It suggests that everything is a service.

Viewing goods and services through an inclusive lens can provide an understanding of a better approach to marketing. The good becomes not just an object a consumer owns, but the services rendered that they obtain through the good. This keeps the customer at the forefront of all business development.

To read the full article go to the Journal of Service Research at this link. (A fee may apply.)