Part 1 Based on the extract below, propose four (4) strategies of tangibilization. List and provide an in-depth

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Part
1 Based on the
extract below, propose four (4) strategies of tangibilization. List
and provide an in-depth description of the four (4) strategies.
Part
2 Find four (4)
companies, each of which is using one (1) of the different
strategies of tangibilization. Provide a brief background on each
company and list which strategy they use.
Part
3 For each of the
four (4) companies, describe how they use their strategy to further
develop customer relationships by way of their services advertising
program.
Use Association, Physical
Representation, Documentation, and Visualization Leonard Berry and
Terry Clark propose four strategies of tangibilization:
association, physical representation, documentation, and
visualization.10 Association means linking the service to a
tangible person, place, or object. Physical representation means
showing tangibles that are directly or indirectly part of the
service, such as employees, buildings, or equipment. Documentation
means featuring objective data and factual information.
Visualization is a vivid mental picture of a service’s benefits or
qualities, such as showing people on vacation having fun. Our
Strategy Insight shows how marketing communication icons can be
used as tangibles.
Feature Service Employees in
CommunicationCustomer contact personnel are tangible
representations of the service and are an important second audience
for service advertising.11 Featuring actual employees doing their
jobs or explaining their services in advertising is effective for
both the primary audience (customers) and the secondary audience
(employees) because it communicates to employees that they are
important. Furthermore, when employees who perform a service well
are featured in marketing communication, they become standards for
other employees’ behaviors.
Earlier in this chapter, we
discussed five aspects of intangibility that make service marketing
communication challenging. In Exhibit 14.1, Mittal describes
strategies that can be used in service advertising to overcome
these properties. Through careful planning and execution, the
abstract can be made concrete, the general can be made specific,
the nonsearchable can be made searchable, and the mentally
impalpable can be made palpable.
Recommendations and opinions from
other customers are virtually always more credible than firm
communications. In situations in which consumers have little
information prior to purchase—something that occurs far more often
in services than in goods because services are high in experience
and credence properties—people turn to others for information
rather than to traditional marketing channels. Service advertising
and types of promotion can generate word-of-mouth communication
that extends the investment in paid communication and improves the
credibility of the messages.
Use Buzz, or Viral, MarketingBuzz
marketing, also called viral marketing, involves the use of real
consumers to spread the word about products without (or without the
appearance of) being paid by the company. Sometimes buzz marketing
occurs simply because customers are avid fans of the service, and
sometimes the company seeds customers with services or products.
Chipotle Mexican Grill, a Denver-based company with nearly 600
outlets, avoids advertising and instead depends almost completely
on the word-of-mouth communication its customers spread about its
unique and tasty food. Chipotle’s founder, M. Steven Ells, makes
giving away samples of its food (as well as satisfying customers)
the basis for its strategy. For example, when the chain opened a
midtown Manhattan outlet in 2006, it gave burritos away to 6,000
people. Even though this cost the company $35,000, the strategy
created 6,000 satisfied spokespeople.12
Leverage Social MediaSocial
media—interactive communication among customers on the Internet
through such sites as Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook—are becoming
avenues for consumers to exchange information. The growth of social
media is affecting many aspects of consumer purchase behavior. In a
comScore survey, almost 28 percent of consumers reported that
social media influenced their decisions about holiday purchasing in
2009.13 Another study showed that 61 percent of consumers rely on
online ratings and reviews before making a purchase. And 26 percent
of consumers post online ratings and reviews.14 According to a
Nielsen study, a full 90 percent of consumers trust recommendations
from other consumers versus 56 percent who trust brand
advertising.15 While social media are not controllable by the firm,
the company can monitor the media and understand what consumers are
saying and recommending. Formal methods and sophisticated
technologies are being developed to track, monitor, and analyze
online communication for brands. Nielsen BuzzMetrics, the innovator
of this approach, gathers brand information online by trolling
millions of lines of Internet communication to find out how
customers feel about brands, how many are talking online, what
issues they are discussing, how marketing is being viewed, and how
efforts to affect word-of-mouth communications are being received.
The service provides industry norms and benchmarks to the companies
who buy their service as well as real-time alerts about
issues.16