End-user
Services can be classified into the following categories:
�� Consumer: leisure, hairdressing, personal finance, package holidays.
�� Business to business: advertising agencies, printing, accountancy, consultancy. .
�� Industrial: plant maintenance and repair, work wear and hygiene, installation, project management.
Service tangibility
The degree of tangibility of a service can be used to classify services:
�� Highly tangible: car rental, vending machines, telecommunications.
�� Service linked to tangible goods: domestic appliance repair, car service.
�� Highly intangible: psychotherapy, consultancy, legal services.
People-based services
Services can be broken down into labour-intensive (people-based) and equipment-based services. This can also be represented by the degree of contact:
�� People-based services - high contact: education, dental care, restaurants, medical services.
�� .Equipment-based -low contact automatic car wash, launderette, vending machine, cinema.
Expertise
The expertise and skills of the service provider can be broken down into the following categories:
�� Professional: medical services, legal services, accountancy, tutoring.
�� Non-professional: babysitting, care taking, casual labour.
Profit orientation
The overall business orientation is a recognized means of classification:
�� Not-for-profit: The Scouts Association, charities, public sector leisure facilities.
�� Commercial: banks, airlines, tour operators, hotel and catering services.
Characteristics of services
The characteristics of services "'intangibility, inseparability, heterogeneity and Perishability - mean that there are new considerations facing services marketers. These differences led to the development of the expanded marketing mix to focus on issues perceived by customers to be important in services marketing.
Customer/employee interaction
The customer/employee interaction takes on a far more significant role in services marketing than in the marketing of physical goods. Consequently, services marketing attaches more emphasis to training and better communications. Relatively new concepts have emerged to support services marketing such as internal marketing and relationship’ marketing. These are now finding increasing acceptance in mainstream marketing and are being applied to areas outside service
