Description
Viva Books Marketing Your Service Business 2007 Edition by Ian Ruskin-Brown
The service sector accounts for around 70% of the gross domestic product (GDP) in the developed world but surprisingly little has been written about the different techniques required to market services successfully.Services and service products are essentially different from goods - and require a fundamentally different marketing approach. Compared to goods, services are more intangible, performance-oriented, closely tied to people and relationships. Traditional marketing theories no longer make total sense.In business-to- business markets services are not confined to the service sector, if in reality they ever were; they are widely used by many firms in the goods sector to build value for the customer and to create the firm's critical differential advantage. For example the USA Office of Trade has shown that some 75% of the value added in their various manufacturing sectors comes via ‘services'.Providing the customers with good services can be an effective way of avoiding devastating price competition and is also the fastest, most efficient way of building customer relationships.With this new book Ian Ruskin-Brown fills an important gap for practitioners who wish to understand the critical differences between goods and services marketing and the implications for planning. His book is packed with advice and reallife case histories based on many years' experience consulting to public and private sector organisations, including the BBC, HM Customs and Excise and several international banks and airlines.• The book uses current real life examples to illustrate the ideas discussed - in practice.• Each chapter ends with an exercise to help you apply the content to your own business.About Author:Ian Ruskin- Brown is a highly experienced marketing consultant. For fourteen years he was course director for the Chartered Institute of Marketing on their courses for Marketing in the Service Sector. He designed, wrote and piloted the in-company training courses on marketing and selling their constituency services for The IBM Marketing University, ICL Training and Kodak Health Imaging.