Promoting Services & Educating Customers, + TB Chapter 7 Flashcards
(28 cards)
5 Ws of integrated service communications model
Who is our target audience?
What are our objectives?
How should this be communicated?
Where should this be communicated?
When should communication take place?
3 broad target audiences
Prospects
Users
Employees
Tactical objectives
Relate to shaping and managing consumer perceptions, beliefs, attitudes, and behaviour during the three stages of service consumption
Strategic objectives
Building a service brand and positioning it and its service products against competition
Persuading target customers they are better
Attract and maintain customers
AIDA model
Explains how consumers move from awareness to interest and desire, and finally to action
Awareness
Interest
Desire
Action
Prospects
Since prospects are unknown in advance, traditional communications mix is needed to communicate to prospects
Users
Cost-effective channels are available for reaching existing users
Employees
Serve as a secondary audience for communication campaign through public media
Important roles of service marketing communications
Promote tangible cues to communicate quality
Add value through communication content
Facilitate customer involvement in service production
Promote the contribution of service personnel and backstage operations
Stimulate and shift demand to match capacity
Intangibility and the 4 problems it creates (GNAM)
Generality
Non-searchability
Abstractness
Mental impalpability
Generality
Services that comprise a class of objects, persons, or events, making it difficult to distinguish from other services
Non-searchability
Cannot be searched or inspected before purchase
Abstractness
No one-to-one correspondence with physical objects
Mental impalpability
Customers find it hard to grasp benefits of complex, multidimensional new offerings
How to overcome intangibility problems
Use tangible cues
Use metaphors
Services marketing communications mix (ASPPSC)
Advertising
Sales promotion
Personal communications
Publicity and public relations
Service delivery points
Corporate designs
3 sources of messages received by target audience
Production channels (firm, employees, outlets)
Marketing channels (advertising, PR, promotions, internet)
Messages outside of the organization (WOM, blogs, media)
Advertising
Build awareness, inform, persuade, and remind
Direct marketing
On-demand technologies empower consumers to decide how and when they prefer to be reached allowing firms to build strong relationships (newsletters)
Sales promotions
Should be specific to a time period, price, or customer group
Generate attention and put the firm at the top of mind
Personal selling
Interpersonal encounters educate customers and promote preferences for brand or product (common in b2b)
Public relations
Involves efforts to stimulate positive interest or association in an organization and its products through third parties
eg: teaching senior managers how to represent themselves at events
Messages through service delivery channels
Service outlets (banners, poster, screens, etc)
Frontline employees
Self-service delivery points
When should communications take place?
Service firms do not generally promote during heavy usage periods
Timing is closely matched to the perceptions and behaviour the firm wants to manage
