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CLASS EXERCISES
For the following exercises and quiz, teaching notes and answers are available in the immediately
following pages.
Class Exercise 1: Service Characteristics
This exercise focuses on how recognizing the characteristics of services can enhance services marketing
strategies.
Prompt for students and answers: The St. Louis Cardinals baseball organization is owned by Anheuser-
Busch, which also operates Busch Stadium, home of the Cardinals. Despite being located in a relatively
small market, the Cardinals have set attendance records. Much of this success is the result of effective
services marketing at the ballpark, which makes attending games an enjoyable experience for fans,
whether the Cardinals win or lose.
1. What part of your experience at a baseball game is primarily intangible? What are you paying
for when you go to a ballgame?
You pay for a ticket that gets you a seat to watch a game, which otherwise is not tangible. In effect,
2. Consumers have difficulty separating the producer (the Cardinals and Busch Stadium) from
the consumption experience (which includes fan behavior, food vending, seats, or bleachers).
Why would this be important for the management at Busch Stadium to understand? In other
words, can you go see a winning team play but not enjoy the game, or vice-versa?
Busch Stadium management spends extensive time training personnel to deal with unruly fans and to
3. Busch Stadium holds around 55,000 fans. What difference does it make that services are highly
perishable? How would this influence sales promotion activity?
4. What aspects of the baseball game experience are susceptible to heterogeneity? What does this
say about the importance of employing high-quality personnel?
Any part of the service that involves people (players, attendants, vendors, food service providers) will
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Class Exercise 2: Managing Services and Success
In Chapter 13, you learned about the unique challenges and dynamics of the service market. Service
providers must address a number of difficult issues to be successful. Student answers will vary.
Below is a list of well-known service providers.
a. Starbucks
For each provider, answer the following questions:
1. Define the nature of the service.
Class Exercise 3: Dimensions of Service Quality
This exercise is recommended as a group activity. Student responses will vary.
In this chapter, you learned about the dimensions of service quality. In this exercise, you will use the
Dimensions of Service Quality in Table 13.2 and evaluate the service quality of your university.
Step 1: Identify the dimensions of service quality.
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CHAPTER QUIZ
1. Of the five dimensions of service quality, the most important is
a. reliability.
b. tangibles.
c. empathy.
d. assurance.
e. responsiveness.
2. In nonprofit marketing, a group of individuals that has an interest in or concern about an
organization, a product, or a social cause is called a(n)
a. direct consumer.
b. client consumer.
c. target public.
d. general public.
e. indirect consumer.
3. This type of communication is important in service promotion because of heterogeneity and the
intangibility of services.
4. _________ quality is defined as customers’ perception of how well a service meets or exceeds their
expectations.
a. Credence
b. Search
c. Product
d. Service
e. Tangible
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SEMESTER PROJECT
In the previous exercises, you developed and refined your product and worked on brand building. This
chapter outlined the complexities service providers face when marketing their services. In this exercise,
view your product, you, as a service and address the following issues.
Step 1: A degree is one way of making education tangible. List five other ways you can make your
education tangible for consumers.
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ANSWERS TO DISCUSSION AND REVIEW QUESTIONS
1. How important are services in the U.S. economy?
Services are very important to the U.S. economy, leading some people to call the United States the
2. Identify and discuss the major characteristics of services.
Services are intangible, inseparable, heterogeneous, and perishable, have client-based relationships,
and involve customer contact. Intangibility causes problems, such as impossibility to store, inability
3. For each marketing mix element, which service characteristics are most likely to have an
impact? Explain.
For the marketing mix elements of creation, distribution, promotion and pricing, the service
characteristics of intangibility, inseparability of production and consumption, perishability,
Distribution of services is influenced by the service characteristics of inseparability and level of
customer contact. In some instances, service marketers use appointments and reservations as
approaches for scheduling the delivery of services. To increase the supply of a service, marketers use
multiple service sites and increase the number of service providers at each site. Customer contact can
also be a problem, especially when a business changes a high-contact service into a low-contact
service. Changes such as this can negatively impact customer service.
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4. What is service quality? Why do customers experience difficulty in judging service quality?
Service quality can be defined as customers’ perceptions of how well a service meets or exceeds their
purchase, services must be judged only during purchase and consumption.
5. Identify and discuss the five components of service quality. How do customers evaluate these
components?
The five components of service quality are.
• The tangibles component includes the physical evidence of the service. Customers evaluate
these through the appearance of the facilities, the appearance of service personnel, and the
6. What is the significance of tangibles in service marketing?
Tangibles include the facilities, employees, or communications associated with a service. They help
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7. How do search, experience, and credence qualities affect the way customers view and evaluate
services?
Search qualities can be viewed prior to purchase. Experience qualities (satisfaction, courtesy, and so
forth) can be assessed only after purchase. Credence qualities cannot be assessed even after purchase
8. What steps should a service company take to provide exceptional service quality?
To deliver exceptional service quality, an organization should first analyze the needs and expectations
of its customers. Methods of determining these needs and expectations can include marketing
9. How does nonprofit marketing differ from marketing in for-profit organizations?
Nonprofit marketing is conducted by individuals and organizations devoted to some goal other than
10. What are the differences among clients, publics, and customers? What is the difference between
a target public and a target market?
Clients are often considered as those individuals directly involved in an exchange transaction with a
11. Discuss the development of a marketing strategy for a university. What marketing decisions
must be made as the strategy is developed?
The development of a marketing strategy for a university would consist of pinpointing a target market
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ANSWERS TO APPLICATION QUESTIONS
1. Imagine you are the owner of a new service business. What is your service? Be creative. What
are some of the most important considerations in developing the service, training salespeople,
and communicating about your service to potential customers?
2. As discussed in this chapter, the characteristics of services affect the development of marketing
mixes for services. Choose a specific service and explain how each marketing mix element could
be affected by these service characteristics.
Services have six basic characteristics: intangibility, inseparability of production and consumption,
3. In advertising services, a company must often use symbols to represent the offered product.
Identify three service organizations you have seen in outdoor, television, or magazine
advertising. What symbols do these organizations use to represent their services? What
message do the symbols convey to potential customers?
Student answers will vary, but they should be encouraged to think beyond the obvious answers.
4. Delivering consistently high–quality service is difficult for service marketers. Describe an
instance when you received high-quality service and an instance when you experienced low–
quality service. What contributed to your perception of high quality? Of low quality?
5. Using the information on service blueprinting provided in the text, visit a local post office
and create a blueprint of its service. Then, using this blueprint, consider the postal service
in terms of intangibility, inseparability, perishability, heterogeneity, client-based
relationships, and customer contact. How would you rate the quality at the Post Office?
Which recommendations would you make for improving the Post Office?
Student recommendation may vary based on their opinions of the USPS. This may also provide
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ANSWERS TO INTERNET EXERCISE
Matchmaker.com
The Internet abounds with dating sites, but few offer as much information about their members as
Matchmaker.com. Matchmaker profiles are gleaned from a survey of about 60 question and essay
responses. Check out the site at www.matchmaker.com.
1. Classify Matchmaker.com’s product in terms of its position on the service continuum.
2. How does Matchmaker.com enhance customer service and foster better client–based
relationships through its Internet marketing efforts?
This may be difficult for students to determine unless they sign up for accounts with the site.
3. Discuss the degree to which experience and credence qualities exist in the serv ices offered
by Matchmaker.com and other dating websites.
Experience qualities are attributes that can be assessed only during purchase and consumption of a
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ANSWERS TO DEVELOPING YOUR MARKETING PLAN
The information obtained from these questions should assist you in developing various aspects of your
marketing plan found in the Interactive Marketing Plan exercise at www.cengagebrain.com.
1. Using Figure 13.1, determine your product’s degree of tangibility. If your product lies close to
the tangible end of the continuum, then you may proceed to the questions in the next chapter. If
your product is more intangible, then continue with this chapter’s issues.
If their product lies close to the tangible end of the continuum, then they may proceed to the questions
2. Discuss your product with regard to the six service characteristics. To what degree does it
possess the qualities that make up each of these characteristics?
13.1 as a reference point when discussing their product in relation to these six characteristics.
3. Using Table 13.1 as a guide, discuss the marketing challenges you are likely to experience.
4. Determine the search, experience, and credence qualities that customers are likely to use
when evaluating your service product.
Search qualities are tangible attributes such as color, style, size, feel, or fit that can be evaluated
5. Consider how your service product relates to each of the dimensions of service quality.
Using Table 13.2 as a guide, develop the evaluation criteria and examples that are
appropriate for your product.
The dimensions of service are
• Tangibles: Physical evidence of the service
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COMMENTS ON THE CASES
VIDEO CASE 13.1: UNICEF AND THE GOOD SHIRTS PROJECT
Summary
This cases focuses on a nonprofit’s marketing campaign to raise awareness about their services. UNICEF
works with local and international partners to raise money and deliver services to relieve suffering and
meet basic needs wherever children are threatened by natural disasters, extreme poverty, violence,
disease, and other problems. The nonprofit worked with artists and a T-shirt retailer to create the Good
Shirts Project to raise money and educate people about the humanitarian crisis in Africa. Each of the
UNICEF shirts is priced at the cost of buying what the shirt shows for people in the Horn of Africa. For
example, the white T-shirt featuring a big, colorful mosquito sells for $18.57, which pays for three
insecticide-treated nets to protect from malaria. Good Shirts is one of a number of initiatives that
UNICEF uses to call attention to world trouble-spots where children are in need of aid.
Questions for Discussion
1. Identify UNICEF’s target public and client publics. Who is the target market for Good Shirts’
social media messages?
A target public is a collective of individuals who have an interest in or concern about an organization,
2. What ideas and services are involved in UNICEF’s product?
This question helps to illustrate the difficulty in defining the product associated with services and
3. What kinds of objectives do you think UNICEF set for the Good Shirts Project? How should
UNICEF evaluate the results of this project?
Student answers will vary. The goal of the Good Shirts Project was to raise awareness of conditions
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CASE 13.2: MARKETING IN-STORE MEDICAL SERVICES: FLU
SHOTS IN AISLE 6
Summary
This case discusses the rise of in-store medical services offered to customers of drug stores, discount
stores, and supermarkets. In most cases, customers meet with a registered nurse or doctor who
attends to their needs. Obviously, services are limited and patients with serious problems must stil l
go to a hospital. However, for routine procedures like vaccinations, these in-store clinics have proved
successful. Convenience and price are the keys to the success of this idea.
Questions for Discussion
1. Which of the six basics characteristics of services are likely to have the most influence on
the way in-store clinics are marketed?
Students may make a case for any of the characteristics.
Heterogeneity is important, because consumers expect a minimum level of service quality when
2. Do you think consumers would use search qualities, experience qualities, or credence
qualities to evaluate the in-store medical services? Explain your answer.
Consumers might use experience qualities to evaluate in-store clinics, determining while the
quality (although they can serve as cues to professionalism).
3. How do you suggest that in-store clinics such as MinuteClinic and Take Care manage the
service expectations of consumers seeking medical attention?
Students’ answers will vary. Two ideas: clinics can manage expectations by emphasizing that