ABSTRACT
Services marketing as an academic discipline has developed rapidly in the last twenty years. From humble beginnings as the ‘stepchild’ [Berry, 1981] of goods marketing, services have become established as an area with specific needs and characteristics that deserve, if not demand, consideration. It has been suggested that any new discipline firstly needs to establish itself in terms of the old, to show that there is a reason for its existence by at least acknowledging, if not rejecting, what has gone before it. Hence the first services scholars were at pains to claim that services marketing is ‘different’ [Berry, 1981]. From early attempts by Kotler [1977], Shostack [1978] and Levitt [1981] to describe products in terms of degrees of (in)tangibility we became convinced of the case for a services marketing discipline with its own characteristics, classification schemes and marketing approaches [see for example Lovelock 1983; Grönroos, 1991; Gilmore and Carson, 1989]. That battle having been won, services researchers have since apparently concentrated on establishing that in fact they are not ‘different’, that on the contrary, by considering products as ‘bundles of benefits’, services are central to marketing theory. Rust and Oliver [1994], for example, suggest that all products are services – we do not after all buy salt because it has any intrinsic value but because it performs a service, it alters the taste of food. Thus we reach a position where the so-called ‘principles’ of services marketing, encompassing customer relationships, are being fed back into goods marketing. For example, ideas about the definition and delivery of perceived quality, developed for the services arena, are now seen to have clear benefits in considering the marketing of tangible goods – ultimately all quality is perceived and it is customer perceptions that count.
