In this four part post, Anand shares his thoughts on improving the services experience from the perspective of both the customers as well as the service providers. Here is the first part of the series:

Most of us are aware of the basic concepts of how services are different from products and the corresponding marketing mix. To reiterate what we have learnt, a service is the action of doing something for someone or something. It is largely intangible. A product is tangible since you can touch it and own it. It becomes complex to evaluate a service as compared to a product mainly because a service is intangible, inseparable, perishable, variable (heterogeneity factor) and also cannot be truly owned. Marketers have also talked about the marketing mix as the 4P’s - price, place, product, and promotion.

Booms and Bitner however refined the marketing mix for services to 7Ps by adding 3 additional factors: People, Physical Evidence and Process. On tolmolbol, we try to rationalize and factor in the customer feedback to help make a better judgment of a service and a service provider and at the same time provide an opportunity for the service provider to receive critical customer feedback to improve or promote the service offerings.

tolmolbol is an attempt to enhance services marketing (from a service provider perspective) as well as services consumption and choice (from a consumer perspective) by:

• creating a platform that allows consumers to connect, share, evolve a feedback process and make informed decisions

• allowing for service providers to understand consumers and improve the additional 3P’s of services marketing - people, physical evidence and process

• using the power of internet/mobile communication to enhance the whole WOMM (word of mouth marketing) experience. No marketing is as good as word of mouth marketing

Next: The power of the platform

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 10th, 2007 at 2:30 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.