Essay About Intangibility Of Services And Statistical Evidence

Marketing-Based Tangibilisation For Services
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Marketing-Based Tangibilisation for Services
DAVID D. C. TARN
This study attempts to explore how to decrease the intangibility of
services by marketing-based activities, rather than the conventional perspective
based on operational activities. Based on the literature, this
study builds a four-element model to circumscribe and define the managerial
problems caused by the intangibility of services. Moreover, this study
proposes four strategies to raise consumers’ sense of tangibility toward
services, namely Quantitation/Ranking, Factualisation/Substantialisation,
Word-of-Mouth Effect, and Information Frequency. Following this,
three services, i.e., cafeteria, extension education, and ophthalmology
services, are selected as scenarios to conduct the experiments. The
results indicate that the four strategies can improve the tangibility of
services sufficiently, especially Quantitation/Ranking. This study also
builds a three-construct, nine-item Services Tangibility Scale to
measure consumers’ perceptions of tangibility toward a particular
service. Statistical evidence confirms the reliability, and discriminate
and convergent validity of the scale.
INTRODUCTION
Tangibilising Services: Operational Issue or Marketing Issue?
Intangibility is the major distinction between services and tangible goods. Most, if not
all, textbooks on services mention this characteristic. Researchers conclude that
intangibility is the most cited and discussed topic [Berry, 1980; Orsini and Karagozoglu,
1988], the most critical feature [Bateson, 1979; Zeithhaml et al., 1985], and even the
only feature [Klein and Lewis 1985] of services in the literature. Edgett and Parkinson
[1993] review 106 related articles from 1963 to 1990 and discover 91 of them remark
upon intangibility, much better than other features. This evidence represents the critical
role that in/tangibility plays in services management.
The recent in/tangibility-related issues seem to concentrate on their shortcomings
toward services providers. Some studies propose that intangibility makes consumers
feel risky, decreases trust to providers, and forces each consumer to form his/her own
psychological condition on performance, providers and consumption decisions
David D. C. Tarn, Associate Professor and Chairperson of Business Administration, I-Shou University,
Taiwan. Email: [email protected]; [email protected]
The Service Industries Journal, Vol.25, No.6, September 2005, pp.747—772
ISSN 0264-2069 print=1743-9507 online
DOI: 10.1080=02642060500103290 # 2005 Taylor & Francis Group Ltd.
[Bateson, 1977; Guseman, 1981], thus producing unmet consumer satisfaction
[Bebco, 2001]. Other articles, such as SERVQUAL of Parasuraman et al. [1988],
emphasise the value of tangibility [Shostack, 1977, 1984; Murdick et al., 1990].
Even further, INTERSERVQUAL (for internal marketing) still involves tangibility
as the essential element [Frost and Kumar, 2000]. Thus, tangibilisation plays an
essential role in services-related fields.
Probably because consumers pay less attention to in/tangibility [Zeithaml et al.,
1988; Reeves and Bednar, 1995], most studies in the literature still focus on operationbased
tangibilisation (OBT) while neglecting to treat it with a marketing-based
tangibilisation (MBT). For instance, Parasuraman et al. [1985] and Fitzsimmons
and Fitzsimmons [1994] define tangibility by examining the extent to which hotels
are well decorated and whether employees are dressed in uniforms. This operationbased
tangibilisation of services surely works, but it may have two limitations.
First, OBT fails to give �predetermined advantages’ to providers. OBT can only
satisfy existing consumers while neglecting to attract the potential ones. Consider
the previous example, when a traveller enters a hotel and enjoys the well-decorated
equipment: s/he has been already a consumer of the hotel. Still, how to guide
those potential consumers who are walking around outside and feeling the hotel
and make them become a client might be much more beneficial than satisfying the
existing ones [Mullins, 1993; Tinkham and Kleiner, 1993].
Second, because intangibility leads to divergent expectation, decision analysis
and evaluation models (abbreviated as EDEM) among the consumers [Bateson,
1977; Guseman, 1981; Zinkhan et al., 1992], tangibilisation could assist to unify,
or at least to lower, the EDEM difference level. However, OBT, at most, helps
existing consumers to evaluate the services, while failing to converge EDEM
among consumers. For a walking-around consumer searching for a hotel service,
intangibility