Service intangibility and its
impact on consumer
expectations of service quality
Charlene Pleger Bebko
Professor of Marketing, Eberly College of Business, Indiana
University of Pennsylvania, USA
Keywords Service quality, Services marketing, Customer satisfaction, Customer service,
Consumer behaviour
Abstract Among the areas which need to be addressed in service quality research is the
nature of consumer expectations across the range of intangibility. Previous research has
compared consumers' service quality expectations across services, but different groups of
subjects were evaluated for each different service. The problem with using different
subjects for each service is that the subject's demographic characteristics may be
responsible for the significant differences in expectations of quality. This research uses a
controlled, repeated measures design where subjects were each asked to evaluate three
services, varying in their degree of intangibility, over a ten week period. This made it
possible to look at service quality expectations without risking the problem that
demographics would account for most of the differences in the data. A classification
matrix for services based strictly on the feature of intangibility is proposed. The
managerial implications of this simplified classification scheme for services are
discussed.
Literature review
Pre-purchase evaluation of service characteristics by consumers, as well as
their production and marketing by providers, is said to differ from products
because of intangibility, variability, inseparability and perishability. These
service characteristics have created problems of definition and measurement
of service quality for marketers. Quality is undeniably of paramount
importance to service providers. Research has demonstrated the strategic
benefits of quality in contributing to market share and ROI, as well as
lowering manufacturing costs and improving productivity (Anderson and
Zeithaml, 1984; Garvin, 1982; Tse and Wilton, 1988).
Service intangibility
It has been argued that the single most important difference between
products and services is the characteristic of intangibility. In fact, it has been
said that intangibility is the key to determining whether or not an offering is
a service or product (Zeithaml and Bitner, 1996). This characteristic has a
profound effect on the marketing of services (Lovelock, 1991; Rushton and
Carson, 1989). Levitt (1981) argued that special difficulties arise from this
intangibility which lead to quality control problems for the producer and
evaluation problems for the consumer. It is this intangibility, or lack of
physical attributes, that most likely is the reason for service variability,
inseparability and perishability.
Besides the concept of the lack of physical attributes of the offering
(outcome), there is also the concept of physical evidence of the process
which needs to be taken into consideration in an evaluation of intangibility.
``Physical evidence is the environment in which the service is delivered and
where the firm and the customer interact; and any tangible commodities that
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JOURNAL OF SERVICES MARKETING, VOL. 14 NO. 1 2000, pp. 9-26, # MCB UNIVERSITY PRESS, 0887-6045 9
An executive summary for
managers and executive
readers can be found at the
end of this article