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Information scientists are often providing services (eg advice, or searches), rather than physically distinct products. Marketing experts acknowledge that marketing a service is more difficult than marketing a tangible product. They identify the following as being characteristic of services:
- Intangibility the service cannot be touched or viewed, so it is difficult for clients to tell in advance what they will be getting;
- Inseparability of production and consumption the service is being produced at the same time that the client is receiving it (eg during an online search, or a legal consultation);
- Perishibility unused capacity cannot be stored for future use. For example, spare seats on one aeroplane cannot be transferred to the next flight, and query-free times at the reference desk cannot be saved up until there is a busy period.
- Heterogeneity (or variability): services involve people, and people are all different. There is a strong possibility that the same enquiry would be answered slightly differently by different people (or even by the same person at different times). It is important to minimise the differences in performance (through training, standard-setting and quality assurance).
People often try to overcome some of these difficulties by ensuring that the physical manifestations of the service (the people running it, the library building, printed search results, web pages etc) indicate the quality of the service. The people running the service are more likely to inspire confidence in the service if they are responsive, reliable, courteous, and competent. If the information centre looks shabby and disorganised, or if the website is difficult to navigate with broken links, then users may assume that the services provided by the centre are slapdash.
Obviously, if a ramshackle library is providing a consistently good service then its users will become convinced of its quality - but it may take longer to convince them.
The problem of perishibility is sometimes overcome by pricing strategies or other incentives to use the service at 'unpopular' times (eg cheap rate phone calls, or guarantees of faster service at certain times of day).
Bluffers can discuss the fine point of whether a specific library problem is caused by heterogeneity or by inseparability of production and consumption. This may help you avoid actually having to solve the problem.
There are many textbooks dealing with services marketing, for example:
- Palmer, Adrian (2000) The principles of services marketing. 3rd ed. McGraw-Hill.
- Zeithaml,Valerie and Bitner, Mary. (2000) Services marketing. McGraw-Hill.
There are also specialist journals (e.g. the Journal of services marketing, and many specialised articles e.g.
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