Discuss Marketing Strategy for service offerings with an example.

Marketing Strategy of Services –
A marketer should have an effective marketing strategy at his/ her disposal for business success whether it’s a product or a service offering.

Services have different characteristics from that of a product. This difference demands a marketing strategy that is exclusive to services. The traditional marketing program or the marketing mix (product, price, place, and promotion) of marketing cannot be relied on for services marketing. Addition of three P’s – people, physical evidence, and process – also form integral part of the strategy.

Christian Gronroos has highlighted that Service Marketing needs to focus on Internal as well as interactive marketing apart from the regular activities of external marketing.

External marketing refers to the regular activities of preparing, pricing, distributing, and promoting the service.

Internal marketing refers to maximise customer satisfaction by training and motivating employees who deal and interact with customers. All the employees should contribute wherever possible to reach complete customer satisfaction.

Interactive marketing refers to the skill of the employees in handling customers.

A customer buying a service should come across excellent experience in interacting with seller’s staff both with respect to soft-skills and technical skills. The customer should experience the same kind of service from all the employees he/ she comes in contact with from the organisation.

For example, consider a customer visiting a bank for opening a savings account. If he/ she doesn’t gets proper answers for his/ her queries despite visiting different desks, the service of the bank will be considered inefficient. The bank stands a risk of losing a potential customer who may visit a competitor for the same service. If the staff is customer service oriented and values the customer’s visit, the buyer will leave the bank with a favourable experience and will be inclined to be this banks customer.

We will see the 7P’s of service marketing for a banking service –

Product – This can be any banking service like savings account, checking/ current account, credit services, demand drafts, etc. How different the offering of one bank is from the other makes a difference. Also known as differentiation – doing things differently. For example, a bank like HDFC offers its certain category of customers a dedicated personal relationship manager. The customer doesn’t needs to go to the bank for most of the things or call customer service number. The customer can directly call the personal relationship manager and get the issues resolved. Similarly, a bank can offer additional services like loan at lower interest rate, etc. for a customer who opens an account. The bank constantly needs to work with the regular customers to innovate itself so that it can stay ahead of competition.

Place – Place factor plays an important role as services cannot be manufactured at one place and delivered at another. A bank cannot be located on the outskirts of a town. It should be easily accessible to target customers. Customer should have a positive experience when visiting the bank. The location should be carefully selected apart from the infrastructure of the building.

Price – The prices for various services like annual fees on credit cards, check clearing charges, maintaining minimum balance, etc. should be relative to the quality of service provided. These should be close to the market prices in the target market. However for an exceptional service, the banks may charge some extra. The banks should be transparent is disclosing the information with its customers clearly so that the customers don’t get surprised when the fees gets levied.

Promotion – Effective communication message highlighting the services in easy to understand format should be created. The Bank logo, slogan, and colouring should be clear. The achievements and uniqueness should be clearly highlighted in various promotion messages.

People – People engagement by the bank staff with courteous and helpful tone goes a long way in creating a favourable customer experience. The bank staff should be professionally dressed to give a professional image of the bank.

Physical evidence – The equipment like computers, feel and look of receipts, pamphlets, various forms, cheque books, debit and credit cards, desks/ counters speak volumes about the service. Its ambience should be clean, spacious with proper lighting and seating arrangements, etc. In case of long waiting time, there should be drinking water arrangements, clean washrooms, proper displays highlighting the desk information, etc.

Process – The process or steps that a customer has to follow for different services at banks. For example, if a customer wants to have access to internet banking, he/ she may have to submit a physical form at a branch for a particular bank. In a different bank the process may be different like submitting account and personal details on the banks website for immediate access. The banks should strive to make the processes as hassle-free as possible not compromising on the security of the account.