Services cover a vast array of different and often very complex activities, making them difficult to define. The word ‘Service’ originally was associated with the work servants didi for their masters. In time, a broader association emerged, captured in the dictional definition of ‘the action of serving, helping, or benefiting; conduct tending to the welfare or advantage of another’. Early marketing definitions of services contrasted them against goods and described services as ‘acts, deeds, performances, or efforts’ and argued that they had different characteristics from goods - defined as ‘articles, devices, materials, objects, or things’. in these early definitions, intangibility and perishability were the two most cited characteristics that critically distinguished services from goods.