Marketing Research- Report on service encounters Assignment

Marketing Research- Report on service encounters - Assignment Example Based on the textbook learning about service marketing, the experiences will be categorised and aging theories will be related to the encounters. The study will be divided in two parts, in this part experience of the service encounters will be highlighted and in the second part, the theories and classifications will be done. Along with that a suitable conclusion and recommendations will also be provided. Service Encounters This section of the report covers the description of the various service deliveries I have encountered in the last week. Although I have come across various service encounters in the recent past, only six of them will be described. The service encounters ranging from banking to tourism services. I have decided to only highlight those service encounters that actually offered something to learn from that experience. Also it should be noted that each of the service encounter that I proposes to shed light on are from different sectors. The entire segment of my service encounters can be found in the appendix section of this study (Refer to Appendix section). PART II Introduction Service marketing is considerably a new concept of marketing and is often dubbed as the subfield of marketing. Service marketing typically refers to the business to business (B2B) and business to consumer (B2C) services (Storbacka, Strandvik and Gronroos, 1994). The notion and real life application of services marketing are evident in sectors such as travel, telecommunication, health care and financial services to name a few. The study is meant for the purpose of understanding the nature of services and to test the viability of the statement ‘service customers is a core competency that marketing managers must develop’. In the section of the study, I will reflect upon my experience of service delivery and will try to relate the same with the theories portrayed by scholars across the world. Lastly, suitable conclusion to the study will be drawn and along with th at recommendation will be provided. Service Classification It is an imprudent act to generalise the concept of services because the services offered by the companies greatly differs. The differences in the services of two companies become more visible when these companies belong to different industries. According to industry experts and academicians, one of the wisest approaches to segment the services of the firms is to use marketing relevant characteristics (Lovelock, Patterson, and Wirthz, 2010). In general, the services are classified on the basis of various factors such as the strategic implication of the characteristics of the services by considering the fact that customers are involved in the production process. The services can be classified as the tangibility/intangibility of the service process, on the basis of the direct service recipients, the place in which the service is being delivered, on the basis of customization and standardization, relationship with the customer, discrete and continuous services, and high & low contact services. In the context of my personal service encounters, I will choose the degree of tangibility or intangibility involved in the process of service delivery. This basis of classification describes the fact that whether the services being offered by the company involves anything physical or the process is more intangible. In my cases, all the services are intangible and but involves different