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Three thoughts on services.

Article Excerpt
Rust and Chung should be congratulated on presenting a very nice, indeed limpid, overview and synthesis of much of the services marketing literature. Their review sparked three associations.

First, somehow when we weren't looking, the field of services marketing matured. In the spirit of philosophy of science, perhaps it's inevitable that while an academic area is forging its identity, the inquiry emphasizes distinctions between itself and the extant literature, in this case, how services differ from goods; that the budding paradigm, in order to be noticed, protests its revolutionary form. Services are more intangible, it was said, with implications of perceptions of risk, and difficulty and subjectivity in customer evaluations. Services are simultaneously produced and consumed and are therefore perishable, it was noted, with implications for more complex demand management. And services are heterogeneous, it was argued, primarily because of the interpersonal components in the service delivery system; namely, the service providers and the customers themselves.

Now, 20-25 years since those early defining days, the area of services marketing and management is sufficiently mature that many of the research questions documented in the Rust and Chung review appear to be equally applicable to goods, at least consumer packaged goods, where extensive databases offer observations of frequency and volume to allow for variance to be modeled. There still exist conceptual distinctions between goods and services, but the primary differences that are popular topics of study seem to be at the subtler tactical level. For example, the pricing questions summarized for the services literature appear to represent similar...

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