Module description
The majority of both developing and developed economies is focused on the production and consumption of services. For example, in the US, current statistics show that approximately 75% of the work force is involved in the services industry. Additionally, 45% of an average family’s budget is spent on services, with similar statistics available for Europe. As economies around the world become more service oriented, so does the importance of studying and integrating all aspects of marketing and managing services.
Today, services are everywhere; they pertain to your interactions with a bank employee, but also to transferring money via your bank account on a mobile device. They include mundane transactions such as ordering coffee via Amazon, but also more transformative services such as visiting a doctor or attending a new MSc at a university that may have an impact on your well-being and the way in which your life will take shape. Even manufacturers increasingly complement the tangible goods they produce with a range of different services. Naturally, moving towards offering services for manufacturers is fundamentally different from firms offering more transformative healthcare, educational or legal services.
In this module you will learn about customers, patients, employees, and other stakeholders in the service arena and familiarise yourself with state-of-the-art insights in service research. This module is specifically designed to combine innovative developments in scientific service research with exciting challenges faced by managerial service practice today. To translate your theoretical insights into industry practice, you will work on several case studies and a real-life consultancy project as part of your coursework assignment throughout the module. By the end of this module, you should thus possess an in-depth understanding on how to successfully market services in today's increasingly global and digitally connected markets.
Assessment details
Group Assignment (50%)
Podcast (50%)
Educational aims & objectives
The overall objective of the module is to provide you with state-of-the-art knowledge on the strategic role of services against the backdrop of an increasingly global and digitally connected market place.
Learning outcomes
By the end of the module you should be able to:
- Develop an in-depth understanding of the foundations of a service orientation.
- Become familiar with service process design through customer journey mapping.
- Discuss the essentials of customer-employee interactions across service contexts.
- Gain insights into how to communicate service offerings and how to design service environments.
- Introduce the phenomenon of transformative services and their particular characteristics.
- Focus on the role of augmented and virtual reality in the off- and online servicescape.
- Learn about the centrality of capturing, measuring and recovering value for customers.
Teaching pattern
Across the semester teaching is expected to comprise of:
- 30 hours combination of lectures, cases and in-class exercises
You will also be expected to spend time preparing for classes and working on the assessment tasks each week. The combined hours of classes and independent learning should equate to at least 15 hours a week.
Suggested reading list
The module uses a number of specialist journal articles and book chapters. For an overview of the types of subjects covered in the module, the following books are recommended:
Christopher H. Lovelock and Jochen Wirtz Services Marketing: People, Technology, Strategy 9th Edition Pearson
Valarie A. Zeithaml, Mary Jo Bitner and Dwayne Gremler, Services Marketing: Intergrating Customer Focus Across the Firm 8th Edition McGraw-Hill Education