Page 142 - Selling the Invisible: A Field Guide to Modern Marketing - PDFDrive.com

purposes—for the purpose of attracting and keeping business—a service is only
what prospects and clients perceive it to be. So “get better reality”: Improve your
service quality. But never forget that the prospect and client must perceive that
quality.

When we are clients of a hotel, for example, we know our room has been
spotlessly cleaned. We do not hold that perception because the room actually is
spotless. We believe that the room is spotless because, as Theodore Levitt
perceptively has pointed out, the hotel has wrapped each glass tightly in paper
and covered the toilet seat with a sanitized wrap. We do not see the quality; we
see these symbols of quality that say “clean room.” It is not the hotel’s service
quality that wins us; it is the hotel’s m e rchandising of its quality.

Our methods for choosing a service are often wild and seemingly arbitrary—
anything but intelligent, cost-benefit–oriented behavior. This suggests that you
cannot expect to seize a market just by creating a provably superior service with
a demonstrably higher benefit-to-cost ratio. The success of American Express
suggests something much different.

Services are human. Their successes depend on the relationships of people.
People are human—frustrating, unpredictable, temperamental, often irrational,
and occasionally half mad. But you can spot some patterns in people. The more
you can see the patterns and better understand people, the more you will succeed
—and this book was written with the hope that it will help you do just that.

Recommended Reading for Service Marketers

Because many of marketing’s greatest battles are not waged in the market, but in
the minds of prospects, understanding how people think helps you understand
how to market and sell.

You see that emphasis throughout this book.
My interest in thinking was inspired by watching people in two different
companies stumble through marketing planning. The thinking I saw proved that
synergy is a myth: Two heads may be better than one, but twelve heads are
worse.
I then read Peter Senge’s The Fifth Discipline to help me understand systems
thinking. I recommend the book, even though it is tough wading. I also
recommend Ichak Adizes’s Corporate Life Cycles. It can help you understand
how people tend to think at different stages of a company’s life.
There are thousands of books on the human mind and memory, but even my