Essay on Services Marketing

People form expectations about the roles they and others will perform. In such a way, companies should take into consideration expectations of customers and to offer them services they expect to receive. A company supplying its services to customers can introduce a new service, which meets customers’ expectations. Thus the company is likely to gain the customer attention and to increase its sale rates as customers will by services of the company because they meet their expectations. For instance, a company may release a new application for smartphones. Customers will expect the new application, if the company announces its appearance. However, customers will not create their own applications because such behaviour contradicts to their role expectations. Instead, they attribute the role of suppliers to companies offering applications, while they define their roles as the role of consumers, who are just using applications supplied by companies.

People subtly encourage others to act within roles they expect from others. Consciously or not people attempt to encourage others to act according to the roles they expect from them. In this regard, companies can actually do the same and encourage customers to make target decisions in favour of the companies’ services. Companies may use a variety of tools, including promotion, celebrity endorsement and others. Thus, they can encourage customers to buy their services and to behave in the way the companies need.

At this point, it is important to place emphasis on the fact that people act within roles they adopt. In such a way, companies offering their services in the market should develop target roles in the behaviour of consumers. Consumers will adopt those roles and they will perform them. For instance, a company can introduce a new service and make people accustomed to this service. In such a way, the company offers customers a new role, the role of users of the new service, and customers grow accustomed to this service and enjoy using it. Therefore, the company selling the service to customers meets its marketing objectives, while customers grow satisfied with the service they buy from the company.

Therefore, consumers perform different roles and the task of companies to make consumers to perform the target role and to encourage other consumers to buy their services. At the same time, shaping the consumer behaviour is very challenging because customers adopt roles they perform in the course of their personal development and companies cannot always change the behaviour of customers with the help of promotion or other marketing tools. However, companies should understand how roles are shaped and performed by individuals and how important customers’ expectations are.

In this regard, the roles of leaders are particularly important because they provide other people with models of behaviour to follow. In fact, people follow the lead of celebrities or other people, whom they perceive as leaders. Therefore, companies can use the full potential of the impact of leaders. For instance, companies can use the strategy of the celebrity endorsement to stimulate the formation of the target roles their customers will perform. The celebrity endorsement can help companies to attract the attention of customers and to make them following the lead of customers. At the same time, companies do not actually need to use the celebrity endorsement. They can just provide its services to a celebrity, while consumers will just follow the lead of the celebrity and order the same services from the company.

However, the role theory is just one of many theories that can be used in the contemporary services marketing. The key element of the script theory is the idea that conceptualizations can be presented in terms of small number of primitive acts performed by an actor on an object. Therefore, marketing should encourage consumers to perform the target behaviour patterns through conveying them clear messages that may be presented in a simple form. In fact, the script theory implies that consumers perceive concepts in a simple and comprehensible form (Spiegel, 2003). In practice, this means that even the most complex concept is analyzed by consumers and deduced to a simple and comprehensible form. Therefore, services marketing should also meet the requirement of the presentation of key concepts in a simple and clear form. For instance, the company offering high tech services should not explain customers how their services work. Instead, they should clearly state what they offer to customers, assure customers that their services work perfectly, and finally, persuade consumers to buy their products specifically because they are better than that of rivals. Hence, complex services and concepts may be deduced to a simple formula learn information about the offered service, understand its advantages and buy.

At the same time, script messages come from modelling by social environment of individuals. This means that individuals have certain models that they follow and services marketing should also provide customers with simple and comprehensible models that they will follow and buy services of companies. Modelling helps individuals to take the decision fast. Consequently, service marketing should involve modelling as an effective tool to attract customers and to shape their behaviour.