Implications And Strategies

Service has historically been a very impor-tant segment for any economy.

- John Pereira

And this got momentum in the wake of information technology revolution and globalization towards the end of 20th century. And today, service is arguably ubiquitous. Just think about numerous services in people’s daily lives! Despite its powerful role in commercial and civic life, building service branding through various strategies is faced with intrinsic challenges. This article attempts to detail the insinuations and strategies to build a service brand.

Zeithaml and Bitner (2003) say that, ‘services are deeds, processes, and performances’. Service is first and foremost characterized by intangibility, heterogeneity, perishability. Here the term intangibility means service product cannot be touched, seen, tasted or patented precisely like tangible goods. Example is the lecture of a professor. Heterogeneity implies that the service product is not the same all the times as service delivery often involves human beings –both, customer and employee who essentially influence the service performance. The performance of the students does not remain the same for the same subjects in different semester’s examination as service provider – professors and service recipient, environment, among others largely influence the performance of the students while perishability means that it cannot be ‘saved, stored, resold, or returned’. Vacant seats in a public transport, for instance, once lost are lost forever.