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Product/Traditional Marketing vs Services Marketing

In the past, we were all so focused on the traditional type of marketing. Usually with its main focus on products, and of course, the most popular strategy in marketing are the 4 Ps and how you manage them.

The 4 Ps, they also mean product, price, promotion and place. I've been so familiar with that ever since my MKT1001 Principles of Marketing course in NUS. Never forgot about that.

In my basic marketing class, I was taught of how to position the product. Many models such as the Ansoff Matrix was applied. Everything was about the product: How you should design the product, whether its functional, how much one should price it, what advertising strategies are needed to promote the product and where you should sell the product. The main focus was... the product.

Then when I come to Copenhagen Business School and took my Advanced Service Marketing course, it is all about the service - the experience. Marketing has shifted into a new paradigm that involves the service. Everything that you're selling, complements the service experience (traditionally, it's the service that adds on to the product).

So there were many service models used in that course. Many of which I had difficulty finding information about through the web. Does this mean that the world still isn't aware that service marketing is the new era of change?

marketingteacher(dot)com has been a favourite website among my marketing friends. But under their section of services marketing, very few information was found as compared to other types of marketing. (I wonder why?)

Reality has shown us successful examples of the service experience, whose main focus, it not entirely on the product.

Starbucks, for one, sells coffee. Coffee, is a commodity. Nothing special, but a great perk-me-up at the beginning of the day. Yea, they have some cool mix of coffee, but you can find similar concoctions in various shopping malls nowadays, just that it's not slapped with the brand: Starbucks.

So what makes Starbucks so special? In the service paradigm, we would call it, the EXPERIENCE. It's all about the experience. The design of the shop, the baristas, the culture, the way they serve the coffee. It's just different from what it has been many years ago. For the price that they are selling, it's not about the quality of the coffee. The price you pay includes the experience of buying and enjoying a coffee at Starbucks. That's what you're paying for.

When you pay $500 for a meal at a restaurant, you would expect good food. But ONLY good food?

The service, the ambiance, the surroundings are all embedded within your expectations even before you step into the restaurant. In your expectations, you are paying for the experience.

Feel enlightened? Haha. But this is just the tip of the iceberg for this course. Advanced Service Marketing has given me another perspective on Marketing which makes me realize that goods are now complements of the experience, instead of the reverse. This... is the new paradigm.

**thoughts of a services marketing student**

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