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Introduction

As the standard of living and demand for leisure time increase, so does

consumer demand for services. Service industries now account for more than

two-thirds of US GNP and more than three-quarters of all employment. The

continued growth of the services sector, coupled with deregulation,

increased franchising, and relaxation of professional advertising guidelines,

has sharpened the competitive pressures faced by service providers. In

response, service firms are placing greater emphasis on understanding buyer

behavior to guide their strategic decisions for attracting, managing, and

keeping customers.

Despite growth in consumer demand for services, there has not been a

commensurate increase in the development of marketing skills in serviceindustries. Service providers generally lag behind their counterparts in the

area of goods (manufactured products) marketing. Part of this may stem

from the fact that the recognition of our dominant services economy is a

somewhat recent phenomenon. As a result, the discipline of services

marketing received a relatively late start compared with more traditional

goods marketing. Not surprisingly, most published research has been, and

continues to be, directed toward understanding the evaluation and purchase

of goods.

The need for services-related research is considerable because services are

thought to have unique characteristics to which techniques for the marketing

of goods may not be directly applied (Berry, 1980; Uhl and Upah, 1983;Zeithaml et al., 1985). And while the number of services-related studies

continues to increase, this body of research has largely emphasized

understanding consumer decision behavior for professional services; i.e.

those professions that have a recognized group identity and that require

extensive training and advanced study in a specialized field (Crane, 1993;

Freiden and Goldsmith, 1989; Hite and Fraser, 1988; Webster, 1988). These

typically involve health, legal, or financial specialists. Considerably less is

known about how consumers evaluate and select nonprofessional services;

e.g. dry cleaners, auto repair, hair care, restaurants (Hill and Motes, 1995;

Turley and LeBlanc, 1993). Because consumers tend to purchase these types

of services on a more regular and frequent basis, it is particularly important

for marketers to develop an understanding of consumer decision making for

nonprofessional services. And yet, while the distinction between them may

be important, both nonprofessional and professional service providers must

develop carefully formulated marketing programs based on a systematic and

thorough understanding of the factors that underlie the decision making of

their customers.

The purpose of this research is to compare and contrast consumer decision

making involving professional and nonprofessional services. Specifically,

THE JOURNAL OF SERVICES MARKETING, VOL. 11 NO. 2 1997 pp. 91-104 MCB UNIVERSITY PRESS 0887-6045 91

An execut ive summary formanagers and executives

can be found at t he end ofthis article

An exploratory investigation ofconsumer decision making forselected professional andnonprofessional servicesRichard Ettenson and Kathryn Turner

Growt h in consumerdemand for services

Need for services-relatedresearch


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three research questions are addressed:

(1) What attributes are important in consumer decision making involvingservices?

(2) Do consumer decision strategies (i.e. the use of attributes) vary between

professional and nonprofessional services?

(3) Do proposed classification schemes for services provide marketers with

insight into consumers decision processes involving professional andnonprofessional services?

BackgroundMuch of the conceptual work in services marketing contends that servicesand goods are characteristically different and, as such, deserve separate

treatment in terms of marketing (Lovelock, 1983; Murray, 1991; Uhl andUpah, 1983; Zeithaml and Bitner, 1996). A smaller number of empiricalstudies substantiate the notion that consumers evaluate goods and services

differently and that services are indeed a distinct group of market offerings(Butler and Abernathy, 1994; Hartman and Lindgren, 1993). However, in theabsence of empirical evidence to suggest otherwise, these studies may also

have fostered the view (albeit unintentionally) that services can be viewed asa homogeneous set of market offerings. To date, only a handful of empiricalstudies have attempted to explore the differences and/or similarities among

services in the manner in which they are evaluated and selected byconsumers (Bowen, 1990; Hartman and Lindgren, 1993; Hill and Motes,1995; Turley and LeBlanc, 1993). The present study will attempt to

contribute to this small but emerging body of literature by investigatingconsumer decision making across several service providers.

The classification of services

In attempts to understand differences among service providers, a number ofclassification schemes or typologies have been developed; in fact, Bowen

(1990) cites 16 studies which had developed services typologies. Suchclassification taxonomies offer both practitioners and researchers the meansfor organizing services into clusters that may share certain marketing-

relevant characteristics. Lovelock (1983) argues that grouping servicesthrough taxonomies will increase our understanding of the way consumersperceive and integrate information about services and the types of benefits

they desire. This, in turn, will enable service marketers to cross-fertilizeconcepts from other services industries and to plan and implement moreeffective marketing strategies (Bowen, 1990).

In the present research, five service dimensions were culled from theclassification schemes proposed by Kotler (1984) and Lovelock (1983):

(1) type of commitment between service provider and consumer,

(2) importance of the service to the overall welfare of the consumer,

(3) degree of customization required,

(4) degree of professional judgment exercised in rendering the service, and

(5) whether or not the service is equipment- or people-based.

These dimensions were then used in an initial pilot study to categorize anddistinguish among a range of ten service providers (including bothprofessional and nonprofessional services). Based on the pilot study results,

it was determined that the nature of the service provided by doctors (aprofessional service) was characteristically different from those provided by

92 THE JOURNAL OF SERVICES MARKETING, VOL. 11 NO. 2 1997

Services are nothomogeneous

Five dim ensions forclassifying services


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both photo finishers and dry cleaners (two nonprofessional services).

Doctors and their patients generally establish a formal relationship and the

service is seen as important to the overall welfare of the consumer. A

doctors service is almost always highly customized to meet each patients

medical needs. Although equipment is used in the treatment of many

illnesses, of critical importance is the doctors judgment in using this

equipment when diagnosing and treating illnesses. Doctors are therefore

thought to be more people- than equipment-based. In contrast, no formal

relationship generally exists between photo finishers or dry cleaners and

their customers and, in general, these services are not considered vital to the

consumers overall welfare. The degree of customization in rendering eachservice is relatively low. Knowledge is required to operate the equipment

central to each nonprofessional service; however, reliance on professional

judgment is usually not a key aspect of either service. Consequently, photo

finishers and dry cleaners are considered to be more equipment- than people-

based.

Based on the above characterizations, differences were expected in

consumers decision making involving doctors compared with either photo

finishers or dry cleaners. The two nonprofessional services were not

characteristically different across the five dimensions; thus no differences

were expected in consumer decisions involving photo finishers and dry

cleaners.

Consumer decision making for services

For the services marketer, it is critical to understand which cues or attributes

of the service offering are valued most in the decision-making processes of

current and potential customers (Crane and Clarke, 1988; Sweeney et al.,

1992). While services researchers have typically employed traditional survey

and market research techniques in an attempt to identify the factors that

affect consumer decision making, such techniques and the studies that

employ them have two related limitations. First, much previous research is

based on consumers self-explicated reports of attribute importance. A

large research literature suggests that these self-reports are often poor

surrogates for consumers actual decision process. A second related problemis that such studies often employ a single-cue paradigm; consumers are

asked to evaluate the importance of an individual attribute in isolation from

the bundle of attributes that necessarily comprise the service offering. The

complexity of the service decision itself is therefore not captured by these

techniques. Furthermore, such techniques provide no useful information on

the psychological trade-offs consumers make among the attributes when

evaluating and selecting services. From a managerial perspective, this may

be the most critical limitation of previous studies. Determining the effect of

an attribute (e.g. office dcor), in an absolute sense, is less useful than

knowing the magnitude of its effect relative to other attributes in the

product/service bundle. It is the latter type of information that will be of the

greatest interest to service providers in making strategic marketing

decisions.

To address these concerns, the present study employs conjoint analysis to

investigate consumer decision making for services. Conjoint analysis allows

for the identification of cause and effect relationships between

product/service attributes and consumer decisions. It is a diagnostic and

strategic technique that has been employed successfully in well over 1,000

academic and applied marketing studies. The conjoint approach is based on

THE JOURNAL OF SERVICES MARKETING, VOL. 11 NO. 2 1997 93

Critical to understandw hich att ributes arevalued most


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the following premisses: consumer decision making involves the evaluation

and combination of multiple product/service attributes; and consumers

overall evaluations of service alternatives can be used to derive their

decision-making strategies (i.e. the relative importance of attributes). To

date, few studies have employed the conjoint approach to understand

consumer decision making for services (e.g. see Zinkhan and Zinkhan,

1990), and only one such study has been published in theJournal of Services

Marketing (see Sweeney et al., 1992). Thus a secondary objective of this

study is further to demonstrate the utility of conjoint analysis in the realm of

consumer decision making and services marketing.

Method

Study participants

A sample of new residents was recruited for study using a list obtained

from a national realty consultant (the sampling frame was all individuals

who had purchased a home in a large metropolitan area in the Mid-Atlantic

region during the three month period prior to the study administration). New

residents were defined here as those who had moved from another city or

state (not just across town) within the last three months. The reason for

studying these long distance moving consumers is that they represent an

attractive and economically potent market segment that has few

preconceptions or commitments to local service providers (Hyman, 1987). In

contrast, individuals who are already established in a community are lesslikely to consider new sources for service providers.

Sixty new residents were chosen randomly from the sampling frame and

contacted by phone to solicit their participation. Of the 43 who could be

reached and who met the specified criteria (i.e. long distance mover), 34

agreed to participate, a response rate of 79 percent. Analysis of demographic

data showed that the sample was primarily female (80 percent), and college

educated (47 percent had an undergraduate degree, while another 18 percent

held an advanced degree). The modal yearly income was $30,000-$39,000.

Average tenure in the new residence was six weeks. Not surprisingly, each of

the participants reported having considerable experience with all three

services.

The conjoint task

In order to provide a realistic service bundle, each participant evaluated a

series of conjoint profiles which described three services doctors, photo

finishers, and dry cleaners based on six attributes:

(1) location,

(2) appearance of the office/outlet,

(3) years in practice/business,

(4) price,

(5) method of payment, and

(6) source of information.

The attributes and their corresponding levels are presented in Table I and

were chosen based on the results of a second pilot study where another

different group of consumers were asked to generate a list of attributes and

levels they considered when evaluating and selecting doctors, photo finishers,

and dry cleaners. Those attributes that were cited most frequently, as well as

those that could be known prior to purchase, were included for study here.


New residents representan attractive market

Need to provide arealistic profile ofservices


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All six attributes were manipulated in an experimental design whichdescribed each of three service providers (see Appendix). For each service,

the conjoint profiles were described by the same attributes and levels,

allowing for the direct comparison of decision strategies (i.e. use of

attributes) across services. When analyzed, the experimental design provided

insight into each consumers decision process.

All participants were told in the task instructions to assume that they had

no prior experience with any of the service providers. In addition, they

were told that the hours of operation and range of services offered by

each provider met their present needs. For the doctor, participants were

also instructed to assume they were choosing a personal physician and thateach of the physicians evaluated had comparable professional

backgrounds.

Participants indicated the likelihood of patronizing each service provider

described by making a mark along an unmarked 100cm. continuum with

ends marked Not at all likely (scored 0), and Very likely (scored 100).

A sample profile for photo finishers appears in Figure 1.

Procedure

All participants received the research materials by mail. Included was a

cover letter thanking them for their cooperation, the task instructions, theconjoint profiles for each service provider, and a postage-paid return

envelope. As requested, all participants returned the completed instruments

by mail within two weeks.


Doctors Photo finishers Dry cleaners

% Importance % Importance % Importance

Attributes and levels Significant rating Significant rating Significant rating

1.Location 41 76 88

Convenient to home 0.04 0.19 0.34

Across town 0.00 0.00 0.00

2.Appearance 24 18 24

Very modern 0.02 0.02 0.00

Not very modern 0.00 0.00 0.00

3. Years in business/practice 47 41 29

Long established inthe community 0.04 0.06 0.01

In business/practice

a short time 0.00 0.00 0.00

4. Price 65 88 82

Slightly above

others in area 0.07 0.23 0.13

Slightly below

others in area 0.00 0.00 0.00

5. Payment method 59 24 65

Cash and personal

checks 0.05 0.02 0.05

Cash only 0.00 0.00 0.00

6.Information source 94 47 88

Recommended by a

friend/relative 0.45 0.10 0.23

Direct mail

advertisement 0.00 0.00 0.00

Table I. Significance of the six attributes and their importance ratings

Advantages of conjointanalysis


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Analysis and results

Overview

The use of conjoint analysis provides two related advantages. First, causeand effect relationships between the six service attributes and consumerdecision making could be determined. Second, analyses could be performedat the individual-subject level. In other words, by analyzing eachparticipants evaluations, their individual decision strategies could bederived. Individual subject analyses provide the foundation for the resultsthat follow.

Specifically, the analyses involved three related steps (for more detail, seethe Appendix). The first step was to determine for all three service providersthose attributes that were statistically significant in the decision making ofthe study participants. The next analytical step was to identify the relativeimportance of the six attributes in each participants decision making. This

second step is necessary because two attributes, while significant in step one,are unlikely to be of equal importance in the consumers decision process.As discussed earlier, identifying the relative importance of an attribute willbe of the greatest strategic value to managers. (The results from Steps Oneand two for all three service providers are shown in Table I.) The third andfinal analytical step was to test for differences in the importance ratingsacross the three services.

Doctors

Use of the six attributes. As can be seen in Table I, source of informationhad a significant effect on the decision making of 94 percent of theparticipants when evaluating doctors. Price showed a significant effect for

nearly two-thirds of participants, followed by method of payment (59percent), years in practice (47 percent), and location (41 percent).Appearance of the office was significant in the decision making of less thanone quarter of the sample.

Relative importance of the six attributes. Table I also shows that source ofinformation dominated participants decisions involving doctors. Onaverage, this attribute explained 45 percent of the variance in their decisionmaking. While next in importance, price accounted for only 7 percent of the


Advantage of conjointanalysis

Figure 1. Sample conjoint profile


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variance. Each of the four remaining attributes location, years in practice,method of payment, appearance of office had a relatively minor impact inthe decision process for doctors.

Photo finishers

Use of the six attributes. Price was the attribute most frequently significantin participants decision making for photo finishers (see Table I). This cuehad a significant effect on the decision making of 88 percent of theparticipants. Next in frequency of significance was location (76 percent),followed by source of information (47 percent), and years in business (41

percent). Fewer participants had significant effects for method of payment(24 percent) and appearance of the outlet (18 percent).

Relative importance of the six attributes. Table I shows that price andlocation were of comparable importance in participants decision making forphoto finishers. These two attributes accounted for 23 percent and 19percent of the variance, respectively. Source of information was ofsecondary importance, explaining 10 percent of the variance. The remainingthree attributes accounted for less variance in consumers decision makingfor photo finishers: years in business 6 percent, method of payment 2percent, and appearance of the outlet 2 percent.

Dry cleaners

Use of the six attributes. When evaluating dry cleaners, location and sourceof information were each significant for 88 percent of the participants. Price

was used next most frequently (82 percent), followed by method of payment(65 percent), years in business (29 percent) and appearance of the outlet (24percent).

Relative importance of the six attributes. Location was most important toconsumers when evaluating dry cleaners; this attribute explained 34 percent

of the variance in participants decision making. Source of information alsohad a considerable impact, accounting for 23 percent of the variance. Priceexplained 13 percent of the variance, method of payment 5 percent, andyears in business 1 percent. Appearance of the outlet explained less than 1

percent of the variance in participants evaluations of dry cleaners (see right-hand column of Table I).

Comparisons across services

The average importance values for the six attributes across all three servicesare presented in Figure 2. When testing for differences, the results revealed,among other things, an interaction between service type and attributeimportance, indicating that the decision strategy employed by participants

was dependent on the service being evaluated. Further analyses revealeddifferences in the use of some, but not all, attributes across the threeservices.

As expected, differences in decision strategies emerged between

participants evaluations involving the professional and the nonprofessionalservices. Source of information was of significantly greater importance inevaluating doctors, while location and price both had a greater impact onparticipants evaluations of photo finishers and dry cleaners. It is interestingto note that, while differences were expected and do exist betweenprofessional and nonprofessional services, no differences were found

between these two service types for the three remaining attributes: method ofpayment, years in business/practice, and appearance of the outlet/office.


Price and location

Differences in decision

strategies


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Each had a relatively minor effect on consumers decisions for both

professional and nonprofessional services.

While no differences were expected when comparing participants use of the

attributes for the two nonprofessional services, some differences did emerge.

Price was of greater importance in consumers decision making involving

photo finishers, while location and source of information had a greater

impact when evaluating dry cleaners. As before, no significant differences

were found in the use of the following three attributes: method of payment,

years in business/practice, and appearance of the outlet/office.

Discussion

The purpose of this exploratory study was to identify the attributes used by

consumers when evaluating and selecting services, and to derive consumer

decision strategies for professional and nonprofessional services. The results

indicate that, for the sample considered here, three attributes dominate their

decision making source of information, location, and price. However, the

importance of these attributes varies between professional and

nonprofessional services. This result supports the few empirical studies

which have investigated and found differences in consumer decision

processes involving these two broad types of service providers (Bowen,

1990; Hartman and Lindgren, 1993; Hill and Motes, 1995; Turley and

LeBlanc, 1992).

In evaluating doctors, source of information was clearly dominant, with thefive remaining attributes playing relatively minor roles. In contrast, when

evaluating the two nonprofessional services, consumers relied primarily on

three attributes location, price, and source of information. As expected,

this study documents differences in consumer decision strategies involving

evalutions of professional and nonprofessional services. Contrary to

expectations, however, consumers were also found to use different decision

strategies when evaluating the two nonprofessional services. For photo


Decision dominat ed bysource of information,location and price

Figure 2 Average importance ratings of the six attributes across the three

service providers


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finishers, price and location had the most impact on consumer decisions,

followed by source of information. For dry cleaners, consumers focussed on

location and source of information, with price playing a secondary role.

These results indicate that each of the three services elicited a rather uniquedecision strategy on the part of consumers. As such, they provide empirical

evidence that, when viewed from the consumers perspective, services are

not a homogeneous group of market offerings.

While differences between professional and nonprofessional services wereanticipated, differences between the photo finishers and the dry cleaners

were not. This suggests that the dimensions proposed by Kotler (1984) andLovelock (1983) to classify services may need further refinement. At one

level they were useful because the respondents used fundamentally differentstrategies when evaluating professional and nonprofessional services.

However, because of congruence on these dimensions, it was believed that

photo finishers and dry cleaners would elicit similar decision strategies from

consumers; this hypothesis was not supported. It would appear thatadditional service dimensions (e.g. frequency of use (see below)) may need

to be incorporated into these classification schemes to provide further insight

into consumer decision making for services.

This is not to suggest, however, that the five dimensions used in this study,or classification schemes in general, are not a valuable strategic tool in the

arsenal of the service provider. Classifying services along a set of marketing-relevant dimensions that may be shared across different industries provides a

good starting point from which to test the utility of the taxonomies inunderstanding consumer behavior, as well as to develop more effective

marketing strategies. However, the results here suggest that additional work

needs to be carried out to understand better how consumers evaluate andselect both professional and nonprofessional services. Along these lines,

subsequent studies should be extended to include other professional (e.g.

lawyers, dentists, accountants) and nonprofessional services (e.g. lawn care,

car rental, hotels, hair stylists) to determine if the results here generalize andprove valuable to other service providers. In addition, attempts to identify

other dimensions that may be used to classify services would be useful.

Managerial implications

The relative importance of source of information, particularly for doctors, is

consistent with a large number of previous studies which found that, in

general, recommendations from friends or relatives will have a considerableimpact on consumer decisions involving services (Hill and Motes, 1995;

Mitchell and dAmico, 1982; Orsini, 1982; Smith and Meyer, 1980).

Conventional wisdom suggests that because services are intangible,

consumers find it difficult to evaluate them prior to use. Consequently,consumers are thought to turn to personal sources whom they perceive as

knowledgeable and/or trustworthy for information about the quality of

service providers (Berry, 1980; Lovelock, 1980, 1983; Rushton and Carson,

1985; Uhl and Upah, 1983).In fact, service providers are often encouraged to stress personal more thannonpersonal sources of information, and to stimulate positive word-of-mouthcommunication (Crane, 1993; Hargrove et al., 1983; Hill and Motes, 1995).To the extent that the results here can be generalized, they suggest that theeffectiveness of this tactic is likely to depend on the nature or type of servicebeing evaluated. It would appear that this approach is likely to have itsgreatest impact for professional service providers, in this case doctors. While


Crucial to understandhow consumers select

services

Stress on personal ratherthan nonpersonal source


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not unimportant for the nonprofessional services, the results show that otherattributes may be employed more effectively and should play a greaterstrategic role in managerial decision making.

In particular, the importance found here for location and price in consumerdecisions involving the two nonprofessional services provides marketerswith significant strategic insight. When the presence of the consumer isnecessary to perform the service, convenience of location is often thought tobe a determining factor in consumer decisions (Carmen and Langeard, 1980;Upah, 1980). The results of this study indicate that a convenient location hasa favorable impact in the evaluations of nonprofessional services, but haslittle effect on decisions involving doctors. This result is interesting giventhat the presence of the customer is not necessary for photo finishers or drycleaners, whereas the patient is almost always present with the physicianduring service delivery. Apparently, a dimension other than the consumerspresence explains the importance of service location. Participants in thisstudy reported that, on the average, dry cleaners were patronized mostfrequently (once a week), followed by photo finishers (once a month); a visitto the doctor typically occurred once a year. This suggests that managersmay require information on frequency of use before capitalizing on theimportance of service location.

The effect of price on consumer decision behavior has been studied

extensively in goods marketing, but has received less attention in theservices literature. The present study shows that price has an important effecton the evaluation of nonprofessional services, suggesting that theconventional wisdom in many service industries may need to bereconsidered. In a study of service managers (Zeithaml et al., 1985), it wasreported that a cost-oriented approach to pricing, as opposed to acompetition- or demand-oriented approach, was prevalent across serviceindustries. The results here suggest that some services could engage in morecompetition-based pricing as a means to attracting customers. However, thisstrategy may not be advantageous to the service provider if price is used bythe consumer as a surrogate for expected service quality. Much of theservices literature contends that consumers may look to tangible attributes,such as price, as evidence of the ability to perform a quality service (Berry,

1980; Rushton and Carson, 1985; Uhl and Upah, 1983). An interestingavenue for future studies would be to consider the effect of different pricingstrategies on consumers expectations of quality across a range of services.

The above discussion identifies some key differences service managers maywish to consider when developing marketing strategies for professionaland/or nonprofessional services. However, it should be pointed out that notall attributes discriminated between the service types. Notable similaritieswere found in the relative lack of importance for three attributes: years inbusiness; method of payment; and appearance of the office/outlet. Perhapsmost surprising is the relatively minor effect for appearance. Conventionalwisdom, and a substantial amount of the services literature, contends thatwhen consumers evaluate services, they gauge what they cannot see by what

they can see (Crane, 1993). While this is likely to be the case, this tenet mayneed to be qualified. As the results here demonstrate, other attributes mayplay a more prominent role in consumers decision processes and thusshould be afforded a greater strategic role by services managers.

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Effect of price on

consumer decisionbehavior

Appearance hasrelatively minor effect


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Appendix. Conjoint analysis

Experimental design

The design was a 3 28 mixed fractional factorial with a full replication. The first independent

variable was the service provider varied at three levels: 1) doctor, 2) photo finisher, and 3) dry

cleaner. The second independent variable was six service attributes varied at two levels each.

The fractional design consisted of 16 cells (Hahn and Shapiro, 1966, plan 5b) and permitted

estimates of the six main effects independent of all two-way interactions. For each of the

service providers, 16 conjoint profiles were developed with the configuration of attribute

levels specified by the design plan. To permit individual-subject analyses, the 16 profiles were

fully replicated.

Analytical steps

In step one of the analysis, individual-subject analysis of variance (ANOVA) was performed

on each participants evaluations for each service provider. Hays (1981) omega squared

statistic (a measure of explained variance) was used to derive the importance ratings in step

two. This was followed by the third analytical step an ANOVA of the importance ratings

across the three services (step 3), with appropriatepost-hoc (Scheffe) tests.

Managerial implications

It should be recognized that conjoint analysis is a valuable strategic tool for services

marketers. The research output provides an organized and systematic understanding of

consumer decision processes and, as such, should be of considerable interest to service

providers as they design and implement marketing programs which are of the greatest value to

current and prospective customers. As was demonstrated here, a range of service attributes can

be included in the design of future studies. This provides the ability to present consumers with

complex decision scenarios that better represent their actual decision environment than studies

employing the single-cue paradigm. What is more, the conjoint approach presents service

marketers with actionable output. To the extent that the results from this exploratory can be

generalized, the service provider has a number of strategic options available better to meet theneeds and wants of consumers. Perhaps most straightforward, service providers can modify

their existing product offering to insure that their attribute bundle closely matches the

preferences of their customers. Another possibility is to attempt to reposition an existing

service offering in the minds of consumers to gain a competitive advantage. This may be

achieved through a systematic and well organized communications program. Finally, the

service marketer may attempt to alter the importance or weight which consumers place on a

particular attribute, particularly one in which they enjoy an advantage. This goal, however, is

not likely to be easily attained, and is inconsistent with the notion that the service marketer

should modify the service offering to match best the needs of the target customer.

Richard Ettenson is Associate Professor of Marketing and Area Coordinator, School

of Business, Bond University, Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia, and Kathryn

Turner is Director of Market Research, Marriott International, Washington DC,

USA.

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Executive summary and implications for the managers andexecutives

Do you know why your customers chose you?

There is a dry cleaner just up the road from me. Its a little too far to walk

with a bag of clothes, and I dont use it. Why? Because you cant park

outside, you have to go round the corner and walk back. Only about 50

yards but enough to make it inconvenient. Instead I drive another couple of

miles to a shop where I can park outside. Perhaps Im not a typical

consumer but this illustrates the importance of understanding how

consumers decide about services.

Ettenson and Turner investigate this issue by looking at what they call

decision strategies. They contend that different strategies will apply to

different services and, further, that there will be significant differences

between the choice of professional services and non-professional services.

The study uses a limited sample of consumers and just three services

(doctors, dry cleaners and photo-processors). However, by using a conjoint

analysis methodology the research gets deeper into the reasons for service

selection than a more broad brush approach.

What they find is that the decision strategies for the three services differ at

least in the key attributes considered in choosing a service supplier. This

suggests that a simple distinction between professional (doctors, dentists,

lawyers, etc.) and non-professional (dry cleaners, photoprocessors,

hairdressers, etc.) services is inadequate as a means of service

classification. While the choice of doctor is dominated by the source of

information and choice for the other two services employs a broader range

of attributes (adding price and location) it is significant that people appear

to evaluate all services as different. Thus our choice of hairdresser may

involve a different factor to our choice of where to get the car fixed.

Services marketers should if Ettenson and Turner are right develop their

own pictures of how consumers select an outlet. We cannot assume that price

and location will matter more than the source of information. We need to

consider how important the service is to the consumer is it possibly amatter of life or death, as with the doctor, or simply a matter of needing a

convenient supplier for something we want regularly, as with a dry cleaner.

It seems that the significance of the service to consumers welfare will affect

how they evaluate suppliers. Perhaps the importance of this variable needs

closer examination in relation to the three key attributes (source of

information, location and price) emerging from Ettensen and Turners

research.

For the services marketer there are some key lessons in this research.

When opening a new outlet consider the significance of location. For

some businesses this may prove critical and, if you get it wrong, it could

make the operation unviable. Moreover, as I showed with my drycleaner example, location is not just about proximity but also about

convenience. Other factors such as safety and security could also affect

choice.

The importance of the information source signals that services

marketers should attend to relationships with established customers and

the way in which they promote themselves. Ettenson and Turner

comment on the importance of word-of-mouth recommendation in

This summary has beenprovided t o allowmanagers and executivesa rapid appreciation ofthe content of thisarticle. Those w ith aparticular interest i n thetopic covered may thenread the article in toto totake advantage of the

more comprehensivedescripti on of theresearch undertaken andits results t o get the fullbenefit of t he materialpresented


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services and this suggests that a decent investment in local public

relations and sponsorship would provide benefits. Over time those

positive photographs in the local press or the slot on the local radio

station might provide more customers than the advertising and direct

mail.

Knowing your customer base will also assist in securing this word-of-

mouth benefit. I have a friend who provides insurance and investment

advice. Hes involved in a range of local organizations Freemasons,

the Conservative Party, Rotary, a local businessmans club and much

else besides. You see his advertisements on dinner menus, annual

reports of local charities and even sponsoring floral displays on

roundabouts. The result is a very successful business because he knows

who his potential customers are and, by being prominent in local affairs,

he is known and respected.

Dont get too hung up on price. One of the weaknesses of many

independent retailers (and retail services are no different) is a feeling

that price is the only important factor for the customer. They worry that

Fred down the road is undercutting them by 30 percent and perhaps

forget that they are better known and more convenient.

Above all service businesses need to appreciate how consumers make

choices about that service. Ettensen and Turners approach is something

that most small businesses can afford to do without employing expensiveresearch organizations at vast costs. Perhaps the involvement of trade

associations could help to provide a far better picture of who the

customers are and why they choose one outlet over another.

The growing body of research into services and consumer services

in particular is now showing that (in Ettenson and Turners words)

services are not a homogenous group of market offerings. There is no

right way to do services marketing. There is no standard model applicable to

any retail service. We have to get out and discover what makes our

customers tick, how they view the service, and, having done this, design

marketing programs that reflect consumer decision-making strategies.

Product marketers (or at least the better ones) have long derived their

marketing programs from understanding their consumers. Servicesmarketers need to take this lesson and develop their own unique approach.

Certainly, we need to move away from trying to squeeze product marketing

theory into an ill-fitting services marketing jacket.

(A prcis of the article An exploratory investigation of consumer decisionmaking for selected professional and nonprofessional services. Supplied by

Marketing Consultants for MCB University Press)

an exploratory

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