Particularities in the Marketing Mix for Service Operations

Essay from the year 2007 in the subject Business economics - Offline Marketing and Online Marketing, grade: 5 (excellent), University of Pécs (International PhD Program), course: Marketing I, language: English, abstract: Johnston and Clark (2001, p.3) point out, that everybody is everyday coming several times into contact with service operations. Following Bruhn (1993, p. 781), highly developed economies can be characterised by an over proportional and strong growth of the service sec-tor. Evidence to this statement can be given evidence looking at the statistics in different countries. For example: In 2005, 72% of all employees in the Federal Republic of Germany had been employed in the service sector, representing an increase of 13%-points compared to 1991 (Statistisches Bundesamt, 2007, p. 291).

The before mentioned development, as well as the dynamic of service sector in itself, has lead to an increasing interest in the special problems of service marketing (Rust and Chung, 2006, pp.560-561). The present essay will explore particularities regarding the marketing mix in service operations. Therefore, first of all the most important terms such as service, service marketing and marketing instruments will be defined. In the following, the 7P¿s of the mar-keting mix for service operations under consideration of the characteristics of services will be examined. Finally, the most important findings and interactions will be summarised and con-clusions will be derived.