Services marketing
Services marketing is a sub field of marketing, which can be divided into the two main areas of goods marketing (which includes the marketing of fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) and durables) and services marketing. Services marketing generally aludes to both business to consumer (B2C) and business to business (B2B) services, and includes marketing of services like telecommunications services, financial services, all kinds of hospitality services, car rental services, air travel, health care services and pro services.
Services are economic activities provided by one party to another. Often time-based, performances bring about desired results to recipients, objects, or other assets for which purchasers have responsibility. In exchange for money, time, and effort, service customers expect value from access to goods, labor, pro skill sets, facilities, networks, and systems; but they do not usually take ownership of any of the physical components involved.
There has been a long academic debate on what makes services not the same thing as goods. The historical perspective in the late-eighteen and early-nineteenth centuries focused on creation and possession of wealth. Classical economists contended that goods were objects of value over which ownership rights could be created and exchanged. Ownership implied tangible possession of an object that had been acquired through purchase, barter or gift from the producer or previous owner and was legally identifiable as the property of the current owner.
Adam Smith’s well known book, The Wealth of Nations, published in Great Britain in 1776, distinguished between the outputs of what he termed “productive” and “unproductive” labor. The former, he stated, produced goods that could be stored after production and subsequently exchanged for money or other stuff of value. But unproductive labor, however” honorable,…useful, or… imperative” developed services that perished at the time of production and therefore didn’t add to wealth. Building on this theme, French economist Jean-Baptiste Say argued that production and consumption were inseparable in services, coining the term “immaterial products” to describe them.