Hean Tat Keh. Early researchers in services marketing tend ... Parasuraman, and Berry, 1985; see SERVICE ... the presence of the customer who views and may.
service separation Hean Tat Keh
Early researchers in services marketing tend to use four characteristics to distinguish services from goods: intangibility, heterogeneity, inseparability, and perishability (Zeithaml, Parasuraman, and Berry, 1985; see SERVICE CHARACTERISTICS). These four characteristics collectively form the IHIP paradigm that has become received wisdom in the field, and is often mentioned in marketing texts (Lovelock and Gummesson, 2004). In particular, inseparability implies that production and consumption of a service take place simultaneously, often in the presence of the customer who views and may even take part in the service production process. In their review, Lovelock and Gummesson (2004) trace the notion of inseparability to the French economist, Say, who describes the act of a physician prescribing a remedy to a patient as the production of the service, and the patient consuming the service by hearing the physician’s advice, and suggests that these two acts are simultaneous. More recently, however, some scholars indicate that the production, distribution, and consumption of services may be separated or joint across time and/or space (Betancourt and Gautschi, 2001). Examples of separable services include freight transportation, dry cleaning, and routine maintenance on equipment and facilities, whereby the production and consumption are not simultaneous, and the customers are often absent during service production. Indeed, Lovelock and Gummesson (2004) conclude that only one category of services – physical acts to customers’ bodies, such as haircut or medical
examination – is inseparate. In the other three categories (i.e., physical acts to owned objects, nonphysical acts to customers’ minds, and processing of information), consumption can be separated from production, if so desired and designed into the system. Thus, inseparability is not effective as a distinguishing characteristic of services in general. In an empirical investigation, Keh and Pang (2010) show that service separation increases customers’ perceptions of not only access convenience and benefit convenience, but also performance risk and psychological risk. Furthermore, these effects differ across services. Specifically, relative to experience services, the effects of separation on service convenience are mitigated, while its impacts on perceived risk are magnified, for credence services. Customers prefer separation for experience services and when they have an established relationship with the service provider. Bibliography Betancourt, R. and Gautschi, D. (2001) Product innovation in services: a framework for analysis, in Advertising and Differentiated Products, Vol. 10 (eds M.R. Baye and J.P. Nelson), JAI Press, Greenwich, CT, pp. 155–183. Keh, H.T. and Pang, J. (2010) Customer reactions to service separation. Journal of Marketing, 74, 55–70. Lovelock, C.H. and Gummesson, E. (2004) Whither services marketing? In search of a new paradigm and fresh perspectives. Journal of Service Research, 7, 20–41. Zeithaml, V.A., Parasuraman, A. and Berry, L.L. (1985) Problems and strategies in services marketing. Journal of Marketing, 49, 33–46.
Wiley Encyclopedia of Management, edited by Professor Sir Cary L Cooper. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
