Services
communications: from
mindless tangibilization
to meaningful messages
Banwari Mittal
Professor of Marketing, Northern Kentucky University, Highland Heights, Kentucky, USA
Abstract Service businesses face a unique challenge: how to effectively communicate the necessarily intangible benefits of their service offering. Their attempts to tangibilize the service are often ill-designed, making
service benefits more rather than less obscure. This article presents a scheme that identifies the communication task at various states of consumer decision making and then matches appropriate communication strategies. Rather than embracing misguided tangibilization, the recommended strategies handle the intangibility
challenge without necessarily using any tangible props.
Keywords Services marketing, Intangible assets, Marketing communications, Advertising, Consumer
behaviour
Introduction
erwise drab and complex technology. And it tangibilizes the intangible service. That much is good. But as readers, we still do
not know what our IT infrastructure actually does miss, and
how exactly Aprisma manages it.
This is a key problem with services advertising. Because services are intangible, it is a challenging task to effectively communicate about them (Berry, 1980; Lovelock, 1996; Zeithaml
and Bitner, 1996). A constant advice from services scholars has
been to tangibilize the service (e.g. Berry and Parasuraman,
1991; Day, 1992). However, while a thoughtful approach to tangibilizing the service works effectively (Berry and Clark, 1986;
Stafford, 1996), many approaches seen in practice (such as the
one adopted in the Aprisma ad) often fail to capture and communicate the core service benefit, or even make it worse. The
purpose of this paper is to examine the service communication
An advertisement from Aprisma, an IT infrastructure technology firm, shows a large photo shot of a ten-year old boy in
baseball gear sitting on the curbside of a now deserted baseball
field, waiting for his ride. The short copy at the bottom reads:
when everyone is counting on you, you need an IT infrastructure with intelligent technology that helps you to monitor and
manage the things that really matter And that is exactly what
Aprisma develops and deliverssolutions as reliable as you.
Imprinted on the picture shot is a bold headline: Whats your
technology missing? (Business Week, March 5, 2001, p. 25). A
reader can quickly interpret the photo: the boys parent is late,
and he or she also did not attend the gamemissing something
that ought to be important to every parent. It humanizes the oth1
problem-recognition;
evoked and consideration set formation;
pre-purchase evaluation;
acquisition and use; and
post-use evaluation (Fisk, 1981).
The communication task is different at every stage, and accounting for these differences becomes particularly challenging
both because a service product is multi-faceted (Mittal and
Baker, 1998), and because many of these facets and outcomes
are intangible. Below we match the aforementioned communication strategies to different service communication tasks at
various consumer decision stages.
Problem recognition. At the problem recognition stage, the
consumer senses a problem in his/her life and looks for a solution. Advertising at this stage has to make a connection in the
consumer mind between the consumer problem and the service
category per se as its solution. For new services, problem recognition may simply entail making the consumer aware of what
the service does, and how this can be of use to the consumer, i.e.
by a direct benefit statement. Often the new service benefit,
even if it is intangible, is easily understood by consumers (e.g.
the benefits of home delivery of groceries or a high speed DSL
Internet connection). The task of problem recognition is, however, more demanding when the direct benefit of the new service is not immediately valued by target customers. These
customers need a demonstration of the second-order benefit of
the service. In the DSL example, where high speed by itself
does not draw a customer, the second-order benefit of, say,
faster online trade execution might be appealing; and this can be
2
ANNUAL EDITIONS
(which is a direct benefit strategy) should be phrased not
broadlywhich would make it general and abstractbut in a
concrete and meaningful way.
Communication task
Communication strategy
Example
Problem recognition
Pre-purchase evaluation
Acquisition and
consumption
Post-purchase evaluation
Total experience
fore the purchase. They might well be, but they all need not be.
Logically, pre-purchase evaluation criteria come predominantly
from ones purchase goals, i.e. the benefits the consumer seeks
from a purchase. From a hair salon, for example, he/she wants
a good hairstyle. Typically, he or she does not go to a hair salon
to socialize with a smiling and courteous hair stylist, or even to
receive a memorable experience. But once he/she has chosen
a salon, and after he/she has been there, the quality of the haircut
plus the courtesy of the stylist and everything else the customer
experienced while at the salon become an input in service
quality evaluation. That is, the post-purchase evaluation takes
into account the totality of the service experience. In contrast, at
the pre-purchase evaluation stage, the consumer focuses on a
limited set of determinant service attributes.
Accordingly, pre-purchase communications should not unnecessarily burden consumers with claims of all dimensions of
service quality or depictions of a total experience, but focus
merely on determinant service attributes. Advertising should
depict a total experience (use of consumption episode strategy)
only if such an experience itself is the principal purchase goal
(e.g. as in a leisure cruise). In other situations, when purchase
goals are more limited and not experiential, pre-purchase advertising should feature only the purchase goals, which would typically entail only technical (rather than functional) quality, and
only reliability and assurance rather than empathy (or even responsiveness). In sharp contrast, post-purchase communication,
directed at retention of current customers (via such channels as
direct mail, Web site visits by registered customers, and more
directed advertising) should feature functional qualities and
total experience. Two communication strategies are especially suited for this task:
ANNUAL EDITIONS
nicate the intangible benefits of service just as well by steering
clear of the pitfall properties of intangibles. Making the service
benefit understood should be the goal of service communications managers, not mindless tangibilization. Mindless tangibilization draws attention away from the core benefits of the
service. Sensible tangibilization seeks to make intangibles understood by staying close to the domain of service benefits itself, and by portraying the role of the service in that domain
compellingly, by documentation and episode strategies as
argued in this paper.
tomer actually narrating on-camera) about their service experience can make an effective communication; and
2. consumption episodewhere current and recent customers
are shown experiencing the delight of the service.
These strategies were of course included also at the pre-purchase evaluation stage; the difference is that at the post-purchase evaluation stage, these approaches have to feature total
consumption experiences, centered around the functional and
empathy and responsiveness dimensions of service quality.
Table 1 summarizes these communication tasks and corresponding recommended communication strategies.
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From The Journal of Services Marketing, Vol. 16, No. 5, 2002, pp. 424-431. 2002 by Bamwari-Mittal. Reprinted by permission of EMERALD
Partnerships, West Yorkshire, UK.