Service marketing involves marketing of the service provided by the company to the customers; it is perhaps the most challenging task as far as any company is concerned because of the various challenges which are there in the service marketing. Let’s look at some of those challenges of service marketing –
- The first and foremost challenge as far service marketing is concerned is that services are intangible implying they cannot be seen so as far as the company is concerned it is very difficult to market services like banking or insurance as compared to products like soaps, automobiles and so on which can be touched. Hence when the company advertises about soap then the customer can go to market and see the product before buying the product but as far as services are concerned customer will first avail the service and then he or she will give feedback, hence customer will not avail the service until he or she is fully convinced of the service which can be done only through proper service marketing.
- In the case of products, they are homogeneous which in turn results in no difference in the quality of the product so for example in the case of BMW cars a particular model will be same for all consumers or Pepsi bottle will taste same for all the consumers. In simple words there will be no variation but as far as services are concerned they will be not same for all consumers so for example banks give different services to saving account holder and different services to current account holders and within saving account holders category banks will give different service to person maintaining $100 dollar in his or her account while service will be different for a person who has $100000 in his or her bank account.
- Another challenge is to have a proper pricing structure in place because in the case of services there is scope for differential pricing, unlike products which can be uniformly charged so for example the price of Pepsi bottle will be same for all type of consumers whereas in case or service that won’t be a case. Hence for example in case of banks schedule of charges for saving account holders is different while schedule of charges for current account holders is different for various services offered by the banks, similarly in case of restaurants the menu of AC dining hall will be different while that of normal dining hall will be different or charges for birthday party will be different as compared to business conference or meeting.
- Another challenge in case of service marketing is the people or workforce of the company because in case of products people do not play major part while in case of services it is the workforce which is the face of service marketing as whether customer is satisfied or not is completely dependent on the person providing the service to the customer. So for example if in the bank you go to person A who speaks softly and cordially then your experience at the bank will be good one and you will say good things about the bank whereas in the same bank if you go to person B who is arrogant then your experience in the same bank will be that of hatred towards the bank.
As one can see from the above that service marketing is full of challenges and that is the reason why the company should prepare a different strategy for service marketing rather than replicating the strategy used for product marketing.