![]() ![]() ![]() Hence, it’s sensible to say that all products are in some important respects intangible, even giant turbine engines that weigh tons. In all cases, the idea is to provide reassuring tangible (in these examples, visual) surrogates for what’s promised but can’t be more directly experienced before the sale. Pickles get put into reassuring see-through glass jars, cookies into cellophane-windowed boxes, canned goods get strong appetite-appealing pictures on the labels, architects make elaborately enticing renderings, and proposals to NASA get packaged in binders that match the craftsmanship of Tyrolean leatherworkers. To make buyers more comfortable and confident about tangibles that can’t be pretested, companies go beyond the literal promises of specifications, advertisements, and labels to provide reassurance. Similarly, you commonly can’t experience in advance moderate-to-low-priced consumer goods such as canned sardines or purchased detergents. If a shampoo is not used as prescribed, or a pizza not heated as intended, the results can be terrible. Such intangibles can make or break the product’s success, even with mature consumer goods like dishwashers, shampoos, and frozen pizza. Though a customer may buy a product whose generic tangibility (like the computer or the steam plant) is as palpable as primeval rock-and though that customer may have agreed after great study and extensive negotiation to a cost that runs into millions of dollars-the process of getting it built on time, installed, and then running smoothly involves an awful lot more than the generic tangible product itself. ![]() A great deal more is involved than product features and physical installation alone. To inspect a vendor’s steam-generating plant or computer installation in advance at another location and to have thoroughly studied detailed proposals and designs are not enough. In practice, though, even the most tangible of products can’t be reliably tested or experienced in advance. You can test-drive a car, smell the perfume, work the numerical controls of a milling machine, inspect the seller’s steam-generating installation, pretest an extruding machine. Often this can be done in advance of buying. Tangible products differ in that they can usually, or to some degree, be directly experienced-seen, touched, smelled, or tasted, as well as tested. Or they can ask experienced customers regarding engineering firms, trust companies, lobbyists, professors, surgeons, prep schools, hair stylists, consultants, repair shops, industrial maintenance firms, shippers, franchisers, general contractors, funeral directors, caterers, environmental management firms, construction companies, and on and on. They can consult current users to see how well a software program performs and how well the investment banker or the oil well drilling contractor performs. They can look at gloriously glossy pictures of elegant rooms in distant resort hotels set exotically by the shimmering sea. Prospective buyers are generally forced to depend on surrogates to assess what they’re likely to get. Intangible products-travel, freight forwarding, insurance, repair, consulting, computer software, investment banking, brokerage, education, health care, accounting-can seldom be tried out, inspected, or tested in advance. And, next, it considers the special difficulties sellers of intangibles face in retaining customers. When it comes to holding on to customers-to keeping them-highly intangible products run into very special problems.įirst, this article identifies aspects of intangibility that affect sales appeal of both intangible and tangible products. The degree of product intangibility has its greatest effect in the process of trying to get customers. Marketing is concerned with getting and keeping customers. Put in terms of our new vocabulary, a key area of similarity in the marketing of intangibles and tangibles revolves around the degree of intangibility inherent in both. While some of the differences might seem obvious, it is apparent that, along with their differences, there are important commonalities between the marketing of intangibles and tangibles. The usefulness of the distinction becomes apparent when we consider the question of how the marketing of intangibles differs from the marketing of tangibles. Everybody sells intangibles in the marketplace, no matter what is produced in the factory. Instead of speaking of services and goods, we should speak of intangibles and tangibles. A more useful way to make the same distinction is to change the words we use. Distinguishing between companies according to whether they market services or goods has only limited utility. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |