I constantly browse the world of internet looking for something interesting to find. Of course, from time to time I look for something useful, something that can be a great addition to my home, or something I or someone from my home use. My sister, on the other hand asked me to look for a great keyboard at guitar center, although she does not have a budget for that yet, all she need to know is the price and how it can be bought. As a brother, I helped her looked for one although reminded her that she still has to save up for her laptop to be used in college and her passion in music can be set aside for the mean time. In my opinion, being exposed daily on browsing the internet can change a person’s timely needs and because of great offers from online stores, many are in favor of changing their plans into buying something seen online because it’s much cheaper and easier to find rather than visiting local stores. But for good thing’s sake, we bookmarked the keyboard found online and maybe in a few months time she will have her laptop and keyboard. A musically inclined architecture student she is.

Service Marketing: The power of goods and services integrated as one customer-oriented process. This can be similarly called the synergy of the two processes. Before, goods-based manufacturing seems to solve profitability of companies, but as the demands change, so as the strategies that should be applied. Such changes occur when an idea becomes more or less obsolete and in effect does not promote further development. For a company to determine itself as a success, it must first determine what industry they are involved in then take steps in which approach should be use. Determining this will be able to be supported by facts that can create greater opportunities. Levitt (1975) argued, But the truth is, it seems to me, that the industry begins with the needs of customers for products. This involves products as goods, and products as services in order for an industry related company to satisfy them. In any case, service marketing is the more applicable approach and which will be discussed in this article. On the front line of the new economy, service — bold, fast, imaginative, and customized — is the ultimate strategic imperative (Hankoff 1994).

Vargo & Lusch (2004) stated, Service marketing has emerged to address much of this broadened perspective, but it is built on the same goods and manufacturing-based model. The influence of this model is evident in the prototypical characteristics that have been identified as distinguishing services from goods—intangibility, inseparability, heterogeneity, and perishability. Dixon (1990) argued that it is “the dissatisfaction with marketing theory that led to the services marketing literature,” or more generally, the creation of services marketing as a subdiscipline (p. 342). Gummesson (1995, p. 251) argues that “activities render services, things render services.” The argument focused on the question of which is better, goods or services? In reality this two should co-exist, suggestions have risen to distinguish the two from one another but the application can be more complex. Marketing scholars have different ideas, theories and applications and they all have been useful in the understanding of marketing. With arguments created, it is clear that there is something wrong about such topics. Service marketing, claimed to be more flexible than goods-based manufacturing process. Since service and goods should co-exist, Vargo & Lusch (2004) stated that instead of service marketing breaking free from goods marketing, it is all of marketing that needs to break free from the manufacturing-based model of the exchange of output. Vargo & Lusch (2004) added the fact that goods are appliances used in service provision, that is, goods and service have a nested relationship. This supported the theme of this paper, integrating service and marketing and recognizing them as a synergy for development. Focusing on goods-based alone is sufficient to achieve something different; service marketing must aid the process which involves directly with customers as a very important factor for success. Gummerson (1995) stated “Customers do not buy goods or services: they buy offerings which render services which create value. . . . The traditional division between goods and services is long outdated. It is now a matter of redefining services and seeing them from a customer perspective; activities render services, things render services. The shift in focus to services is a shift from the means and the producer perspective to the utilization and the customer perspective.” (p. 250). These customers are the ones who can really make great impact on the market. Vargo & Lusch stated “in using a product, the customer is continuing the marketing, consumption, and value-creation and delivery processes.”

Customers being said to be an important part of the service process, companies must find a way to tend to their needs. They buy goods along with the benefits that can be extracted from them; these goods are then considered as goods integrated with service marketing approach. Kotler (1977, p. 8) notes that the “importance of physical products lies not so much in owning them as in obtaining the services they render.” This statement is pushing the idea of what the consumers want. As for companies, “to continue growing, companies must ascertain and act on their customer’s needs and desires, not bank on the presumptive longevity of their products” (Levitt 1975). Another key to success is the understanding of the company’s goal in which they act as what they are aiming with addition to customer-oriented approach through service-based marketing. The organization must learn to think of itself not as producing goods or services but as buying customers, as doing the things that will make people want to do business with it (Levitt 1975). Same goes to the fact that customers need to be proactive and take part in the production process of what benefits they want to experience. Normann and Ramirez (1993, p. 69) state that “the key to creating value is to coproduce offerings that mobilize customers.” Oliver, Rust, and Varki (1998) echo and extend the idea of coproduction in their suggestion that marketing is headed toward a paradigm of “real-time” marketing, which integrates mass customization and relationship marketing by interactively designing evolving offerings that meet customers’ unique, changing needs. The fact that service-based marketing is directed to consumers, the complex relationship between companies and customers will more likely be made simpler. Consumers will develop relationships with organizations that can provide them with an entire host of related services over an extended period (Rifkin 2000).

The whole idea has emerged not long ago and companies can say that they are having a hard time distinguishing service from goods-based process. The marketing literature rarely mentioned “immaterial products” or “services,” and when it did, it mentioned them only as “aids to the production and marketing of goods” (Converse 1921, p. vi; see Fisk, Brown, and Bitner 1993). But in fulfilling this ideology, companies must also embrace the education for all their employees and everyone who are taking part in this great cause. Customer relationship is somewhat misunderstood as tending with their concerns only but they should be dealt with proper care and attention. The changing nature of customer relationships demands a new breed of service worker, folks who are empathetic, flexible, informed, articulate, inventive, and able to work with minimal levels of supervision (Henkoff 1994). Vargo & Lusch also stated “In a service-centered model, humans both are at the center and are active participants in the exchange process. What precedes and what follows the transaction as the firm engages in a relationship (short- or long-term) with customers is more important than the transaction itself.”

The view that an industry is a customer-satisfying process, not a goods-producing process, is vital for all businesspeople to understand. An industry begins with the customer and his or her needs, not with a patent, a raw material, or a selling skill (Levitt 1975). In addition to that, differentiating selling from marketing is important. Levitt (1975) argued “The difference between marketing and selling is more than semantic. Selling focuses on the needs of the seller, marketing on the needs of the buyer. Selling is preoccupied with the seller’s need to convert the product into cash, marketing with the idea of satisfying the needs of the customer by means of the product and the whole cluster of things associated with creating, delivering, and finally consuming it.” In understanding the whole process, it must start with one’s self worth and knowing what they can do to provide it to customers. Customer-perceived quality is always the driving factor, and the willingness to accept a trade-off between standardization quality and customization quality, usually for a commensurate trade-off in price is actually a form of customization (Vargo & Lusch 2004).

This article aims to make it a point to managers and other professional practitioners that while goods-based manufacturing is important, service-based marketing can fill in the missing connections between companies and customers (Chased & Garvin 1989). Marketing and manufacturing personnel have to work closely together to both understand customers’ expectations and fulfil them (Chase & Garvin 1989). The way a company manages its marketing can become the most powerful form of differentiation. Indeed, they may be how some companies in the same industry differ most from the other (Levitt 1980).

Brand management and product management are marketing tools that have demonstrable advantages over catchall, functions modes of management (Levit 1980).

Economic conditions, business strategies, customer’s wishes, competitive conditions, and much more can determine what sensibly defines the product (Levit 1980).This is a workload for everybody and with proper discipline and application; they will be able to understand the significance of goods and services to the operation of an organization which recognizes the customer’s ability to promote greater success and industrial growth. This article will serve as an information base for future promoters of growth and development.Goods and services must not be distinguished from one another but instead, recognize them as a synergy, having nested relationship and must be customer-oriented. Let us remember the quite written by Levitt (n.d) CREATIVITY is thinking up new things. INNOVATION is doing new things.

Bibliography

• Chase, Richard B., Garvin David A. (1989), “The Service Factory,” Harvard Business Review, (July-August), 61-69.

• Fisk, Raymond P., Stephen W. Brown, and Mary Jo Bitner (1993), “Tracking the Evolution of the Services Marketing Literature,” Journal of Retailing, 69 (Spring), 61–103.

• Gummesson, Evert (1995), “Relationship Marketing: Its Role in the Service Economy,” in Understanding Services Management, William J. Glynn and James G. Barnes, eds. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 244–68.

• Henkoff, Ronald (1994), “Service is Everybody’s Business,” Fortune; Education Collection, (June), 1-6.

• Hollander, Stanley C. (1979), “Is There a Generic Demand for Services?” MSU Business Topics, 79 (Spring), 41–46.

• Kotler, Philip (1977), Marketing Management: Analysis, Planning, Implementation, and Control, 3d ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

• Levitt, Theodore (1975). “Marketing Myopia” Harvard Business Review, (September-October), 1-14

————- (1980), “Marketing Success Through Differentiation—of Anything,” Harvard Business Review, (January-February) , 2-9.

• Normann, Richard and Rafael Ramirez (1993), “From Value Chain to Value Constellation: Designing Interactive Strategy,” Harvard Business Review, 71 (July–August), 65–77.

• Oliver, Richard W., Roland T. Rust, and Sanjeev Varki (1998), “Real-Time Marketing,” Marketing Management, 7 (Fall), 28–37.

• Rifkin, Jeremy (2000), The Age of Access: The New Culture of Hypercapitalism, Where All of Life is a Paid-For Experience. New York: Putnam.

• Vargo, Stephen L. and Robert F. Lusch (2004), “Evolving to a NewDominant Logic for Marketing,” Journal of Marketing, 68 (January), 1-17.

————- (2004), “The Four Service Marketing Myths”, Journal of Service Research, Volume 6, No. 4, (May) 324-335. Doi: 10.1177/1094670503262946.

]]> http://loudandraw.com/archives/939/feed 1 http://loudandraw.com/archives/862 http://loudandraw.com/archives/862#respond Wed, 10 Feb 2010 03:37:54 +0000 http://loudandraw.com/?p=862

In college, not everything is provided by the college institution and students are required to buy their own materials if it is not available in the college library. Books are important part of college life because they act as references to lectures, research and other academic stuffs. In some cases, students cannot afford to buy books because of some extremely expensive priced books. I don’t think that is a problem anymore because valorebooks.com sells cheap and affordable college textbooks, with it research papers can be easier to accomplish. Some say that the more books you have in your desk, the higher chance of passing college, I think with the availability of cheap and affordable college textbooks nothing can stop students from graduating. In addition to that, since they sell used books, you can also sell them your used books, great isn’t it? This is a great help for college students and a great way to learn on a cheap and affordable way.

What is marketing without its market, a business without someone to deal with and much worse, a company without industry? These questions tell simply what customers can do for an organization in order for them to provide long-term, satisfying and extremely valuable goods or services based on service- centred and oriented logic of marketing. When we say service-oriented marketing, I believe that we should understand that this primarily address the power of consumers to bring unlimited possibilities for opportunities, development and growth of a business, and a way for marketers to render satisfaction through goods or services itself. While on the other hand, goods-based marketing is about the output which is product – improvement of products for distribution and maximizing profits as reflected by sales. While both of them seem fairly applicable, services for me can reach a whole new level when goods are used as a tool for satisfying customers.

Levitt on his “Marketing Myopia” discussed about the narrowness of product-oriented marketing and expanded his views on service-oriented marketing that could help the growth of companies and not drag them to extinction. Levitt believes that the continuous growth of a company includes defining what they are and what industry they are in, for them to think and act according to the needs of consumers without the barrier of being myopic. The role of consumers became popular because it is where the heart of providing goods and services should be, know them well and you can give them what they need. His idea about oil companies being stagnant for growth made me thinking, if only they have defined themselves to be an energy industry, then they should’ve not let outsiders steal opportunities from them. If they have concentrated more on consumer relations, then they should have opened their minds and develop new sources of energy, but instead, they acted as suppliers, supporting other firms and relying on them to provide what they fear to develop by themselves. Companies must stop being nearsighted and embrace the evolution of marketing.

Vargo & Lusch on their “Evolving to a New Dominant Logic for Marketing” discussed briefly the evolution from goods-based marketing to the new age acceptance for service-oriented marketing. There are differences in goods based from service-centred dominant logic and one of them is about the role of the customer. In traditional, they are the recipients and in service-centred they are the co-producer of service. Companies must take cue from them to know what is being demanded. Goods based marketing is a good strategy, but not all of the time. It may have been one but it was a long time ago when that same strategy is still applicable in that certain age.  I believe that there is a reason for service marketing to be thought of by scholars as an innovative strategy in marketing, it’s because in goods-based, there are borders, hindrances and limits to development. Strategies like all others have places that they fit in. Same strategies don’t work efficiently if used the second time, what is needed is the formulation of a more flexible one that will cover important aspects of the whole process.

Another thing that struck me was the idea of mass production being selfish. It aims to produce what they can from what they have and from there, maximize their profits, the problem is – they sell, and marketing is only a residue of selling. Marketing should be about the value, the benefits from goods and services being realized by consumers. There is a huge difference in selling and marketing. Selling focuses on the needs of the seller while marketing focuses on the needs of the buyer. Selling is product made into cash in marketing it provides the overall satisfaction from the creation of goods to the benefits it will serve. My realization about this is that we can mass produce but we should accompany it with hard thinking. Companies need to understand of consumer preferences, not their own need for profit. Success should also be based on the companies’ followers and they are the consumers.

Levitt,  Vargo and Lusch may have lived from different time but what they all have in common is that they find goods-based process incomplete, myopic, the reason that service marketing emerged as the new dominating factor is because it holds the key point to success – the customers. It is also true that service-based process is full of research. The idea is to pay wisely and appropriately to researches done, never do it with bias to suit the needs of sellers. Never settle for filtered results that cling directly to the answers that companies wanted to hear in the first place. Consumers are unpredictable, study their preferences and they can give continuous growth. In the future, this also strategy may also come to a point that it will be obsolete, but through guidance of consumers the growth will still be possible. Companies should aim not only for success, but also with entrepreneurial greatness.

In marketing, we face a very important question; “can service-based operation be more effective than a goods-based manufacturing model”? 40 – 50 years ago, marketing concentrated on goods-based manufacturing model and its perspective is to satisfy the demands of consumers by offering them tangible products. But in our modern time, a service-based operation should be more dominant for it involves the whole process of satisfying the consumers and at the same time they proactively contribute to the development of the whole structure of a more effective and efficient marketing approach. Goods are also services, what consumers buy is the long term benefits from tangible or intangible goods and services.

Let me break down the reasons. According to Stephen Vargo and Robert Lusch, there are four myths in service marketing that divides goods from services and they are; Intangibility, Heterogeneity, Inseparability, Perishability. It is said that when we talk about Intangibility, services lack the tactile quality of goods but in reality services often have tangible results because in a customer’s perspective they buy activities that render services and things also render services. The function of a good is to serve as a supply for a service to materialize. The idea is that a thing will remain useless unless it offers a valuable service and function to the consumer.

The other myth is about heterogeneity where it is said that services cannot be standardized. But really, who will layout the judgement, is it the manufacturer or the consumers? The standards are perceived by the consumers given the fact that goods are homogenous by nature; consumers will be the ones who will judge it according to how they will be satisfied because what they are looking for is the service rendered by that determinate good. Even though marketers offer homogenous or standardized things to consumers, not every one of them will have the same perception therefore these things or goods are services in because consumers have different perceptions on how they think they will be satisfied – each individual have unique judgement. There are similarities between the myths heterogeneity and inseparability. The way that I understand inseparability, consumers are always involved in the process and production of what-should-be value of tangible goods. If consumers interact with the tangible goods, they will be able to perceive its value and to the extent that how that determinate thing will render service from them. We must put this in our mind, “the goal of service marketing is to maximize consumer involvement”. Examples of which are their feedbacks and cooperation to fully experience what has been offered. When there is an involvement goods or services will be further innovated.

The last myth is about perishability. It is true that tangible goods are perishable, fruits rot, cars rust and will lose its manufactured value but not in service marketing for it gives long-term benefits to consumers. The idea in this myth is said to be that services cannot be produced ahead of time and be inventoried. The truth is that both tangible and intangible goods can be inventoried and for service it is measured again by the long-term benefits from the rendered service itself. Who would want to put tangible products in an inventory anyway? That only means there is an unbalanced distribution in the logistic cycle of the operation. In addition to this myth, tangible products have no value when manufactured, it is only created when it come in contact with consumers. Again consumer involvement is much needed because the focus is not on the products but on the customer’s value creating processes.

Everything is about service marketing, may it be tangible or intangible. Physical goods only become an element in rendering services. I think it is time that we need to embrace service marketing and declare goods-based manufacturing model as an outdated strategy in marketing. What it can do is to help future marketing people to choose the right steps in satisfying the demands of the customers. Remember this: benefits from goods are obtained by use of these goods—goods are merely the distribution vehicle or channel for service provision; they are appliances (Vargo and Lusch 2004). Keep in mind that even if goods and services differ in some ways, the synergy of these two will lead to the success of a company’s goals.

This year’s Strategic Marketing talked about the power of the cyber world, meaning the internet as a good source of opportunities for marketers and other alternatives where students can get good opportunities like sports casting. There are lots of opportunities out there that are undiscovered by most of us though some tried and triumphed in their fields, others might just take it for granted so the speakers told their story and how they managed to be on the top of their careers. For marketing and advertising, TVC, Print, Radio are one of the most effective media to air an advertisement, but since the age of the internet has risen dramatically, advertisers and marketing professionals used the internet as one of their advertising media. Social Networking sits prove to be a good way to start advertising since people of all ages love to share their life in the internet with friends and build networks around the world.

The president of Microventures, Bam Aquino and the Vice-President of PLDT talked about What’s Cool? What’s Hot? as the theme of this year’s strategic marketing. Butch Jimenez talked about rising to the top and being recognized through positive attitude and practices. Standing out among all competitors is important so that consumers will notice it and maybe be the brand inside the consumer’s heads. Being the icon that first pops in the consumer’s head means that a brand successfully managed to penetrate the market be become respected and widely used terms in the industry.

There are lots of cool jobs out there waiting for the marketing students just like what Executive Director of Asia Pacific Film Institute and Executive Director for Talent Development of Business Processing Association told the students and listeners in the Stratmark 2009 and also mentioning the opportunities in the Business Process Outsourcing. BPO, is a form of outsourcing that involves contracting an operation and responsibilities to third-party service providers.

Clickthecity.com’s Business Development Director Edward David, Friendster Country Manager Narciso Reyes and Community Manager of Yahoo Philippines Jonas Renejo delos Reyes talked about the advertising and marketing opportunities through the internet and how successful can it be with the target markets being reached properly. New Media are the new technologies developed to provide people to have an easy life and marketing professionals also use this to make their companies compete in a very innovative world. Being the new trend in the Marketing Industry, more and more companies and marketing professionals learn to embrace the fact that they should use this for advertising like posting ads, rich media and being the no.1 most searched term in the internet to produce a very good increase in sales and popularity. Internet users are consumers as well so this is a good chance for companies to keep up with the consumers. But one thing that I can’t forget is that, one of the speakers told that though internet proves to be a good way to market and advertise, we should not forget the power of TVC, print radios or the local media because certain people can only be accessible by those mentioned.

As for my personal experience, I can proudly say that I’ve been using internet to earn some cash by just being a blogger who advertises products and review them so that people can have a good idea about it just by searching the internet. Being a blogger can be hard sometimes, but as long as I enjoy writing there will always be a reason to make it worth it. Another thing, the topics I post should always be visible and accessible to others so that readers can see it clearly when my post is redirected from search engines. One technique to make sure that the topics I post will be seen by others is by Search Engine Optimization which means that choosing the right keywords can earn you the right spot in search engines such as Google, Yahoo and so on. I am glad that I became part of this year’s Strategic Marketing because I have proven what I am practicing for a year now and I also learned a lot of things just by listening to the speakers. Thanks to Philippine Junior Marketing Association, many marketing students from different colleges and universities  learned a lot about what is hotter and what is cooler in our industry.

Lamig!!! It’s cold today isn’t it? PArticulary here in Philamlife building or any other centralized airconditioned buildings anywhere. It’s raining all day especially yesterday wednesday and it feels unlikely summer. Imagine a cold season in the middle of the summer season, it is a WOW! Anyways, I think I better go now, I have some “benchmarking” to do here in Mindshare’s office as a trainee. Ciao!

Yeah!! I won and after a long, long time, maybe four long years of not playing this sport, I was able to play and go home a champion. Ha-ha! It was December 17 2008, the third day of our intramural and my first day to show my presence again after five days and I was already scheduled to play table tennis supposedly when the clock goes 9:00 am. the scheduled time was not official and it is prior to changes so the committee waited for the first batch of players to finish the second year’s championship then resume the third year’s game on 2:30 PM. I had the first game and won it easily then onto the next game, and the next, and the finals in which I battled “the” what we know as the two-time champion of this game for the last two years. He was lucky though, this is the only time I played after I transferred college from Mapua.

Obviously, as the title of this post says, I won and managed to snatch the gold from the defending champion of the table tennis intramural event. Anyway, the downside of this success was my body got really soar the next day, I had a hard time moving and all my muscles which are involved in twisting and turning turned against me and punished me for being lazy for the past few years, Maybe because I forgot to stretch? That was what Jha said to me after I told her my story. Ha-ha

Here is the catch, the night before my game, I was really excited to play and the morning of my game my stomach almost turned green with excitement but after a little warming up, I am back to my real self, I’m back with my reflexes and then on to a great physical and mental condition! I thought my stomach won’t stop hurting, a sign of nervousness or a sign of excitement perhaps? Well anyway, the most important thing is I won and I was happy about that, imagine the long years of my absence on this sport and still played like a real champ from the past. I must be really, really thankful that I still have it in my system.  So there, I hope that this news brighten up your day as it does to mine.

Trivia: Sam Ekwe played table tennis against me, just a game though and he was not in the official list. I never thought that he knows how to play this one. As a result, I won two games and as for him, none. It was a good game and we enjoyed it.

Looking for a Research Paper Topic? Maybe a Custom Research Paper would help. I hope that you would find some from my Research Paper Example(s) here.

Hi! this morning, I will be representing my block which is BMC to play on Singles Division of Table Tennis. Yes it is our intramural and I am so excited to play. It has been 4 years since I played for the gold like when I was in High school and during my last match in Mapua Institute of Technology Makati. I just hope that I can pull this one out and if I got lucky, I can snatch the gold away from the depending champion. So much for the wishful thinking, just wish me luck guys alright? Ping pong, Whif Whaf, whatever you may call it, it is still named table tennis universally.