This document discusses the intangibility and inseparability characteristics of services. It explains that unlike goods, services cannot be seen, touched, tasted or smelled as they are essentially a performance. Services have some tangible search qualities but credence qualities that are difficult to judge. Additionally, services must be produced and consumed simultaneously due to their inseparability, meaning consumers are involved in both the production and consumption of a service.
This document discusses the intangibility and inseparability characteristics of services. It explains that unlike goods, services cannot be seen, touched, tasted or smelled as they are essentially a performance. Services have some tangible search qualities but credence qualities that are difficult to judge. Additionally, services must be produced and consumed simultaneously due to their inseparability, meaning consumers are involved in both the production and consumption of a service.
This document discusses the intangibility and inseparability characteristics of services. It explains that unlike goods, services cannot be seen, touched, tasted or smelled as they are essentially a performance. Services have some tangible search qualities but credence qualities that are difficult to judge. Additionally, services must be produced and consumed simultaneously due to their inseparability, meaning consumers are involved in both the production and consumption of a service.
"The role of intangibility and inseparability within services."
Intro
Hey guys, so the topic we have been given is the role of intangibility and inseparability within services.
intangibility
A service is essentially a performance, which is where the characteristic of intangibility comes from. Unlike a good, we cannot touch, see, taste nor smell the service we are being provided. An example of this is a burger versus dentistry service. We can physically see and hold the burger, but not the performance by the dentist.
Although services are intangible, they do have a few tangible aspects, which are called search qualities. This basically means that we can judge the quality of the service prior to consuming it. But in the end, this is like judging a book by the cover; do we really know what the service is like until we actually consume it?
Services are always more difficult to assess than goods due to the intangibility aspect. We can review it after the consumption through out experience, but even then there are aspects of the service that we cannot judge after the purchase and consumption, called credence qualities. There are areas the reasonable consumer is not knowledgeable in, like how do we know what they service provider has done to fix our phone? We dont. We just know that its fixed. So how do we judge that service?
All these aspects of intangibility of services make it a very difficult product to judge.
Inseparability
A service is also impossible to separate production from consumption, called the inseparability characteristic.
This means that a service must be produced whilst simultaneously being consumed. Consumers are so involved in the production of services that it is very difficult to produce the service without the consumers presence, hence the inseparability of services production and consumption.