Explain features of services.class 11
Answers
Feature # 1. Intangibility:
Intangibility is an important consideration that complicates the functional responsibility of a marketing manager, specially while influencing and motivating the prospects/customers. The goods of tangible nature can be displayed, the prospects or buyers can have a view and they can even test and make a trial before making the buying decisions. The selling processes are thus found easier. We are aware of the fact that services are of intangible nature and it is intangibility that complicates the task of decision-maker
While motivating, they find it difficult to perform and display and the positive or negative opinions regarding the services come up only after the completion of the using process. The customer can’t touch the services, they albeit can’t smell them. In a true sense, it is not a physical object. It has mental connotations. According to Carman and Uhl, a buyer of products (goods) have an opportunity to see, touch, hear, smell or taste them before they buy.
Of course, we don’t find the same thing with the services product. It is the professional excellence of decision-makers that counts here, that influences the entire process and that helps them substantially. While selling or promoting services, we need to concentrate on benefits and satisfaction which a buyer can derive after buying. We can hardly emphasise the service itself.
As for example, the banking organisations promote the sale of credit cards by visualising the conveniences and comforts the holders of the credit cards are likely to get from the same. Services carry with them a combination of intangible perceptions. As for instance, an airline sells the seat from one destination to another.
Here, it is a matter of consumers’ perception of the services and their expectations not smelling or tasting the services. They expect safe, fast, decent services. A service by nature is an abstract phenomenon. Thus, it is right to mention that due to intangibility, the selling and marketing of services become much more complicated.
Feature # 2. Perishability:
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Another point complicating the task of a professional is the nature of perishability that we find in the services. The goods if not sold today can be stored, preserved for further selling. Thus, the risk element is here in a different form. But in the context of services, if we fail to sell the services, it is lost only not for today but even for the future. If a labour stops to work, if a seat in the aircraft remains unsold, if a bedroom in a hotel remains unbooked, a chair in a cinema hall remains vacant; we find the business non-existent and the opportunities are lost and lost forever. The services can’t be stored or preserved.