Rent

The research question is does services marketing require a new core paradigm or is the one in place sufficient valid to explain service marketing. The current paradigm is that four characteristics- intangibility, heterogeneity, inseparability, and perishability-make services different from goods. The author’s argument is that services offer benefits through access to temporary possession.

2.

The authors give an alternative view that services offer benefits through access or temporary possession, instead of ownership, with payments taking the form of rentals or access fees, and these payments offer a different perspective with which to view services. Their argument, they believe, is it opens opportunities to market goods in a service format. The authors sought to answer the question through developing a new paradigm which employed research with their primary emphasis being looking into how time is perceived, valued, and consumed and the notion of services as a means of sharing resources.

3.

Service marketing refers to any such marketing that involves the promotion of services as opposed to products, and is proposed as the dominant logic in marketing should be adjusted to reflect that provision of services as the basis of economic exchange.

The IHIP concept attribute specific characteristics to services that implicitly or explicitly differentiate them from physical goods. These four characteristics are intangibility, heterogeneity, inseparability, and perishability

Intangibility is a concept comprising the degree of materiality of the product or service studied and the degree of difficulty involved in defining, formulating, or understanding in a clear and precise fashion the product or service in question.

Heterogeneity refers to the problem both marketing and operations, primarily in relation to the difficulty of achieving uniform output, especially in labor-intensive services.

Inseparability refers to the attachment of production and consumption in the service sector, specifically, the simultaneity of production and consumption that sees the customer serve as the co-producer along with the traditional role of being consumer.

Perishability refers to the fact that services cannot be saved, stored for reuse at a later date, resold, or returned. The unused service capacity of one time period cannot be stored for future use.

4.

Kerin et al. identified that there are four unique elements to services: intangibility, inconsistency, inseparability, and inventory (323). Kotler posited that services have four major characteristics that greatly affect the design of marketing programs: Intangibility, inseparability, variability, and perishability (446). Pride and Ferrell said services have six basic characteristics: intangibility, inseparability of production and consumption, perishability, heterogeneity, client-based relationships, and customer contact (325). Solomon and Stuart stated that regardless of whether they affect our bodies or our possessions, all services share four characteristics: intangibility, perishability, inseparability, and variability.

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IHIP is related to specific categories because the concepts it puts forward are not readily applicable to Internet services. IHIP does not cover situations that demonstrate the ability to obtain and consume services without interacting with a human provider, a fact that challenges much of our existing knowledge on service marketing.

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The author’s submit that there are sufficient exceptions to discredit the claim of universal generalizability of IHIP. The authors note the fact that many services actually possess one or more of the opposite characteristics, namely, tangibility, homogeneity, separability, and durability. The claim that services are uniquely different from goods on the four specific IHIP characteristics is not supported by the evidence but is only true for certain types of services, just as it is for some goods.

7.

The argument for a new paradigm lies in IHIP not being comprehensive. Customers can feel and see Customers feel and see something happening to them when they fly, have surgery, stay in a hotel, or receive beauty treatment hence some services are tangible. Improvements in service quality and automation have made it possible to achieve high degrees of reliability and consistency in delivery of such services like dry cleaning and an oil change, hence heterogeneity. Some services successfully eliminate customer involvement for example warehousing and internet based services. Education, information and entertainment services are durable, in contrast to the stipulations of IHIP.

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Three consequences emerge from the lack of a comprehensive paradigm. The first is to abandon the notion of service marketing as a separate field. The second is limiting the notion to a subset of what it currently covers, and the last is to develop a new unified paradigm.

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The most viable option is defining a new unified paradigm that emphasizes non ownership of goods. This can be demonstrated via identifying different categories in the non-ownership framework and adopting it as a framework that covers service marketing.

10.

The article offers a fresh way of looking at already existing literature on service marketing, proposing that evidence based methods be given precedence over theoretical concepts like IHIP which is not backed by evidence.

11.

The rent/access paradigm has a few limitations in that money spent on access is gone, and the delivery of goods as a service reduces choice in good selection and as a result leads to poor service.