Page 50 - Duct Tape Marketing

34 Part I: Getting Started in Marketing

In a Service Business, Service
Is the Product

If your business is among the great number of companies that sell services
rather than three-dimensional or packaged goods, from here on when you see
the word product, think service. In your case, service is your product.

Today, nearly 80 percent of all Americans work in service companies.
Services — preparing tax returns, writing wills, creating Web sites, unclog-
ging kitchen drains, styling hair, or designing house plans, to name a few —
aren’t things that you can hold in your hands. In fact, the difference between
services and tangible products is that customers can see and touch the tan-
gible product before making the purchase, whereas when they buy a service
they need to commit to the purchase before seeing the outcome of their
decisions.

Even nonprofit organizations have products. Look at a Boys and Girls Club.
One of its products is the service it provides to young people. Another is the
recognition and satisfaction it provides to benefactors who contribute funds
to keep the club in business. If it rents the club facility to other groups to use
during off-hours, the rental activity represents yet a third “product.”

If you generate revenue, then you’re selling something — your product.

Telling “Just the Facts” about
What You Sell

Freeze-frame your business to study the products you offer your customers.

To get started, consider the products of a lakeside resort as an example. The
owners would list the number of cabins, seats in the restaurant, and row-
boats for rent. Then they’d include the shopping opportunities provided by
the resort’s Barefoot Bait Shop. Their list might also include summer youth
camps, winter cross-country ski packages, and all-inclusive corporate
retreats.

A law office might describe its product offerings by listing the number of
wills, estate plans, incorporations, bankruptcies, divorces, adoptions, and
lawsuits it handles annually. And if it’s well managed, the lawyers will know
which of those product lines are profitable and which services are performed
at a loss in return for the promise of future business or a larger customer
relationship.