Don’t Escape the Details of the Servicescape

Your stomach is growling with hunger pains and you need a great place to eat. You don’t want just any place but need that perfect place that expresses your mood. Feeling a little upscale with that great bonus you just received from work you scan your memory for a restaurant that will not only satisfy your appetite but also perpetuate that positive feeling into the evening.  You know big things are going to happen since you have now been recognized for your great work. Thinking of possible alternatives you finally settle on a fancy French establishment with valet, fireplaces, patio dining, fountains and violin music in the background. It costs more but heck it still feels great to spend your reward for superior effort!

What you have just thought about is called servicescape. The servicescape is the physical environment that customers exist in that influences both customer behavior as well as overall impression of the business. Successful retail management includes the understanding of physical layout and how this impacts the overall customer experience and impressions of the total experience.

Such experience is often seen in the way establishments are designed, how atmosphere feels, and the overall impression that customers leave with. Knowing and managing the servicescape can help create positive feelings and memories that help to cater to customer’s self impression. Servicescapes often include the following concepts (Fitzsimmons & Fitzsimmons, 2011). 

• 1.)    Ambient conditions: The back ground of the environment such as lighting, temperature, noise music, etc… This is the general use of our five senses to create a culture and environment that encourages positive feelings and memories of an organization. Nothing sells a home like the sweet smell of Apple Pie.
• 2.)    Spatial Layout and Functionality: The successful layout of an environment often determines how well customers can manage to find their way within the environment in order to encourage quick paced purchasing behavior. When the layout of the establishment is not strong a resulting safety and service problem results.
• 3.)    Signs, Symbols and Artifacts: The signs, symbols and artifacts create a perception of the business as it relates to its value and purpose. Those signs, symbols and artifacts can also create impressions of an organization. For example, a high end restaurant is likely to have fireplaces, pictures of elaborate dinners, and certain types of silverware to ensure that all of these factors are in alignment with the sales product. 

One of the beneficial ways to encourage stronger servicescapes that lead to stronger sales and customer satisfaction is through the use of surveys. Surveying customers helps organizations understand the overall perception of the environment, layout, and symbolism of the organization. For example, A total of 109 participants from six hotels in Delhi india found a positive relationship between ambience, spatial relationship, and symbolism on customer support (Medabesh & Upadhyaya, 2012). This study helps highlight the overall nature of the need servicscapes in enhancing products and services. 

With servicescapes the devil is often in the details. The right forks, flowers, table cloth, temperature, food design, food offerings, decorations, etc… all work together. Understanding how these multiple aspects of the business fit together to create a totality of impression can do wonders with enhancing the sensory experience of customers. The next time you go to eat remember that it isn’t only the food that counts.

Fitzsimmons, J. & Fitzsimmons, M. (2011). Service Management: Operations, Strategy, Information Technology (Seventh Edition). NY: McGraw-Hill. 

Medabesh, A. & Upadhyaya, M. (2012). Servicescape and customer substantiation of star hotels in India’s metropolitan city of Delhi. Journal of Marketing & Communication, 8 (2).

Book Review: Unconscious Branding by Douglas van Praet

Modern marketing entails the embedded secrets of unconscious branding. The book Unconscious Branding: How Neuroscience Can Empower (and inspire) Marketing by Douglas van Praet delves into the influences of the unconscious on human behavior and marketing effectiveness. The understanding of neuroscience explains how feelings lead to choices that that result in product sales.

Advertisers and product designers spend billions of dollars every year on creating the right advertising mix to lure potential buyers to their products. Hidden desires and needs seem to drive much of human behavior even though we are often unaware of why we are purchasing products or how it enhances our self-perception. Yet these unconscious forces are pulling us to fulfill these undiscovered needs from morning until evening….perhaps even beyond. 

When Freud discovered his sense of the unconscious, it had a vast effect on the climate of the times. Now we are discovering a more accurate vision of the unconscious, of who we are deep inside, and it’s going to have a wonderful and profound and humanizing effect on our culture –David Brooks

The essence of all marketing is the feeling of being appreciated. This appreciation is based in our need to be part of a biological and cultural network that is connected together to ensure mutual survival. We constantly seek to purchase items that raise our status and fulfill subconscious cravings in order to raise our biological opportunities in society. Appealing to these subconscious cravings encourages the fulfillment of deeply held needs that are not manifested fully on the conscious plane. 

The book will bring you three seven steps of designing a successful marketing campaign. They include interrupting patterns, creating comfort, leading the imagination, shifting feelings, satisfying the critical mind, changing associations and taking action. In essence, the steps are designed to draw people’s attention and then lead them from feeling to action while satisfying any logical misgivings. 

The book doesn’t appear to have a lot of research included in the pages but it does provide some thought provoking explanations on marketing. The theoretical research support is available to intelligentsia and it appears to be a sound understanding of how the subconscious creates motivations and actions. The concepts are broad so don’t expect any specific marketing success advice but it does lead you into some useful concepts that can be beneficial for rounding out marketing plans. 

Van Praet, D. (2012). Unconscious Branding. NY: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN: 978-0-230-34179-1

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The Development of Products in the Global Internet Marketplace

Service implementation and management requires a keen understanding of the organization and the process of development. Executives that understand these steps are likely to realize higher levels of success when designing new services and creating new revenue streams. Ignoring any aspect of the process could result in poor design, poor implementation, ineffective customer interface or poor cultural fit that loses capital and investments.

Ideas for service innovation can come from a variety of sources ranging from individual employees to customer feedback. When such ideas are brought forward they are often screened to ensure feasibility and fit with the organization’s strategic plan. As a basic process the organization develops the concepts, analyzes its utility, designs the product and then launches it into the market (Johnson, et. al., 2000). The process is cyclical in that feedback from customers and improvements in design encourages produce relevancy. 

No matter how effective innovation is it must have some value to customers. This value can be real or imaginary in terms of a cost or social benefit. Since these values are often dependent on individual perception some organizations consider using a more systematic approach to possible revenue streams.

The value of the product to the customer is one of the most important ways of determining whether or not the successes of such innovations are likely. Some organizations use an equation to determine the relative value of the product or service. An analysis helps to maintain a level of objectivity when making important strategic offerings. 

Value = Results produced for the customer + process quality/price to customer + costs of acquiring the service. 

In such an equation the results produced are based on the value to the customer, the process quality is the value of the delivery system, price to the customer is its monetary cost, and costs of acquiring the service is the amount of effort in obtaining the product. Each of these factors is analyzed in terms of their quantitative value in order to determine the market value of the product or service. 

Organizations that have moved online and capitalized in the virtual e-commerce market have created dominance in commercial selling and activity. With a proper customer interface and a strong distribution network such organizations allow customers to complete much of their shopping and effort themselves. More importantly the amount of actual customer cost in terms of effort has been reduced significantly with improved search engine performance. 

Technology has also been beneficial in developing efficient service quality by bridging the virtual and physical worlds. Ensuring that the entire process of purchasing online to delivery at the door is efficient raises the perceived value of the service. The easier the process the more satisfaction created. Some organizations might use the SEVQUAL approach which includes analysis of reliability, responsiveness, assurance, empathy and tangibles (Fitzscommon & Fitzscommon, 2011). 

The nature of the Internet also creates world integration of services, ideas, and interaction. Despite this growing trend specific cultures still have their own particular customs. Organizations that bridge these cultural gaps to sell products seek ways of understanding how to not only operate businesses but how to manage the labor thus associated. Gert Hofstead (n.d.) conducted a survey that assessed the work-related values in fifty countries that used the following five dimensions of Power Distance (equality), Individualism (individual treatment), Masculinity (traditional work roles), Uncertainty Avoidance (ambiguity tolerance) and Long-Term Orientation (time commitment). Each of these aspects shed lights of how local customers impact business imperatives.

The success of service innovation and development rests on understanding how new developments are processed within organizations, assessed for value, implemented in the market, and relate to specific cultural needs of the target customers. Understanding this chain of development helps to create executive awareness of the overall wider steps to successful service development. Failure is more likely to occur when steps are either skipped or discounted in development. 

Johnson, S., Menor, L. Roth, A. & Chase, R. A critical evaluation of the new service development process: Integrating service innovation and service design. In New Service Development, eds.

Fitzsimmons and Fitzsimmons. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 2000, pp.1-32.

Fitzsimmons, J. & Fitzsimmons, M. (2011). Service Management: Operations, Strategy, Information Technology (Seventh Edition). NY: McGraw-Hill. 

Hofstead, G. (n.d.) Cultural Insights. Retrieved April 2^nd, 2013 from http://geert-hofstede.com/

Service Management and Strategic Implementation

Service has an important component to provide within the national economy. Such services enhance the quality of life for many individuals and make their day more effective. The post industrial society is based upon the ability of people to afford and able to use such services effectively. As society progresses from self-sustenance to shared sustenance the complexity of infrastructure and specialized services combine to create an inter-wrapping of networks and structure. 

The development of society and the development of services are on the same trajectory of growth. Society moved from providing extractive services such as agriculture and mining to secondary services such as manufacturing and processing. We are also now offering tertiary services such as restaurants and hotels and have grasped a higher level of governmental, financial and retailing structure. It is possible that we are moving into the quinary age of health, education, research, arts and recreation (Fitzsimons, & Fitzsimons, 2011). 

The appropriate development and delivery of services requires a strategy to make it effective. There should be alignment of the service system delivery, operating strategy, service concept, and target market segments (Sasser & Schlesinger, 1997). Each of these elements creates a function that when working in tandem provides the highest level of value for the customer and the potential highest level of income to the organization. Providing customer value and earning revenue are one in the same.

One of the ways to determine whether or not an organization is in proper alignment with its environment is to conduct a SWOT analysis. The SWOT analysis includes the concepts of Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. Each organization has its own strengths that are unique to that company, has weaknesses that can be improved, opportunities for expansion into the market and threats that can damage its future sustainability. 

Strategy is the ability to take the information from the SWOT analysis, or other form of market scanning, and implement it within the organization. This is the most difficult task of any executive that desires to make an impact. They must make sense out of the information, honestly review their organizations capabilities, and then implement a strategy that impacts the entire chain of functioning throughout the organization. In the end this change should come to an appropriate output which raises sales, reduces expenses and improves revenue.

Fitzsimmons, J. & Fitzsimmons, M. (2011). Service Management: Operations, Strategy, Information Technology (Seventh Edition). NY: McGraw-Hill. 

Sasser, H. & Schlesinger, L. (1997). The service profit chain. NY: The Free Press.