The traditional marketing mix was designed and gained popularity in an era where most businesses sold products. Any service provision and the role of good customer service was largely ignored and the potential impact on brand development and the user experience was not understood. This was remedied when Booms and Bitner proposed their extension to create the services marketing mix that we see today. The extended model should now be used to create competitive strategies in a more holistic manner.
The Service Marketing Mix involves Product, Price, Place, Promotion, People, Process and Physical Evidence. Firms marketing a service need to get each of these elements correct. The marketing mix for a service has additional elements because the characteristics of a service are different to the characteristics of a product. The Characteristics of a service are:
(1) Lack of ownership
(2) Intangibility
(3) Inseparability
(4) Perishability
(5) Heterogeneity.
To certain extent managing services are more complicated then managing products, products can be standardised, to standardise a service is more difficult as there it can be affected by factors outside the service providers control.