Journal of Services Marketing

Revisiting “big ideas in services marketing” 30 years later

Leonard L Berry
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Leonard L Berry , (2016),"Revisiting “big ideas in services marketing” 30 years later", Journal of Services Marketing, Vol. 30 Iss
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 Revisiting “big ideas in services marketing”
30 years later
Leonard L. Berry
Department of Marketing, Mays Business School, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas, USA

Abstract
Purpose – “Big Ideas in Services Marketing”, published in 1987, identified seven precepts fundamental to the just emerging field; this paper aims
to explore the relevance of these ideas three decades later and discuss what should be changed and what should be added.
Design/methodology/approach – Deep reflection on the central ideas proposed in a paper written 30 years ago through the lens of the author’s
personal research and learning journey was the basis for preparing this retrospective essay.
Findings – The seven ideas presented in the original paper have stood the test of time although one of the seven “services branding” was
incompletely developed. After 30 years, four more ideas need to be added, i.e. competing on value, meeting and exceeding customers’ expectations,
saving customers’ time and effort, and generosity.
Originality/value – The proposals in the 1987 paper offered an early framework for consideration by scholars who have produced a worthy body
of work and brought services marketing into its own as a legitimate discipline.
Keywords Branding, Convenience, Service quality, Value, Generosity, Services marketing precepts
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Paper type Viewpoint

Thirty years ago, I wrote “Big Ideas in Services
Marketing[1]”, which was published in the inaugural issue of
The Journal of Services Marketing (Berry, 1987). When the
current editors invited me to write a retrospective essay on this
article, I first reread it to refresh my memory of the ideas I had
proposed then. Frankly, I was surprised to discover how well
these ideas have stood the test of time. After all, the world in
general and the market place in particular have changed
dramatically since 1987. And I have learned and developed as
a services researcher.
Nonetheless, the seven ideas I proposed in the original
article remain relevant, and I continue to teach more fully
developed versions of them. With the exception of recasting
one of those ideas, the biggest difference were I to rewrite the
article today would be to add rather than to subtract concepts.
The original list
Briefly, the seven ideas in the 1987 paper include:
1 Distinguish between the marketing department and the
marketing function. In services, marketing is a line function,
not just a staff function. Providers who perform the service
for customers are marketers; a key staff marketing
department role is to teach and enable the providers who
interact with customers to be effective marketers.
2 Leverage the freedom factor. Service providers need the
freedom to “custom-fit” the service to customers. Service
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organizations need to thin the rulebook and capitalize on
the customization opportunity that provider-to-customer
interaction offers.
3 Market to employees. Service organizations improve their
capability for satisfying the wants and needs of external
customers by first satisfying the wants and needs of the
providers who serve them; in services, internal marketing
paves the way for external marketing.
4 Market to existing customers. Excellent services marketing
requires innovation, quality service and relationship
building after customers become customers, not just
before. Marketing effectively to existing customers can
increase market share by generating positive word-of-
mouth, expanding the relationship and improving
retention.
5 Be great at problem resolution. Service failures occur in the
best of organizations. Service excellence means not only
delivering the regular service well but also the recovery
service well. How organizations respond to service failure
is the acid test for service quality.
6 Think high tech and high touch. Technology and personal
service offer customers different benefits. Most service
organizations need both capabilities, rather than one or
the other.
7 Be a power brander. Service intangibility creates specific
challenges in branding. An organization that can
overcome these challenges and create a distinctive,
relevant brand that suggests an image symbolic of its
purpose and offerings has a competitive advantage.

Journal of Services Marketing

30/1 (2016) 3–6 Received 26 October 2015
© Emerald Group Publishing Limited [ISSN 0887-6045] Revised 26 October 2015
[DOI 10.1108/JSM-10-2015-0318] Accepted 5 November 2015

3
 Big ideas in services marketing
Leonard L. Berry
What I would change
My original “Big Ideas” list focuses on the make-or-break role
of front-line service providers; refers to concepts that have
become well known as internal marketing, relationship
marketing and service recovery; includes technology (before
the Internet rose up to change our lives and revolutionize
marketing); and makes the case that services, not just
manufactured goods, need to be branded. These concepts
were a foundation for a still immature field in 1987. (For a
discussion of the development and evolution of the services
marketing discipline, see the study conducted by Berry and
Parasuraman, 1993).
Today, I would rewrite the power branding section. It is
incomplete and misses the most important point of services
branding, which is the customer’s experience when using the
service. My earlier discussion focused on the communications
component of building a brand, or what I later called the
“presented brand” (Berry, 2000): an organization’s controlled
communications of the brand, such as the brand name and
advertising. Effective communications is critical in services
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branding, especially in creating brand awareness and trial; it
opens the door to the service. However, the customer’s actual
experience in using the service disproportionately influences
“brand meaning”, i.e. the customer’s dominant perceptions of
the brand. A poor service experience can close the door
opened by the presented brand. I also overlooked the impact
of external communications that a company can influence but
not control, such as word-of-mouth and publicity. Figure 1
depicts the dynamics of services branding as I see them today
(Berry, 2000).
Another change from the 1987 article would be the title.
Referring to one’s own ideas as “big” seems, in retrospect,
immodest. I chalk it up to the exuberance I felt when services
marketing was beginning to blossom as a sub-discipline of
marketing.
What I would add
I have learned a great deal about services marketing since
publishing the 1987 article. In 1987, A. Parasuraman, Valarie
Zeithaml and I were still in the early stages of our Marketing
Science Institute study of service quality that spanned five
phases over a 12-year period. And I had yet to author three
books based on in-depth field studies of excellent service
organizations (Berry, 1995, 1999, 2008). Nor had I embarked
on my work in health services research that dates back to 2001
Figure 1 A service branding model
Organization’s
Presented Brand
Brand Awareness
External Brand
Brand Equity
Communications
Customer Experience
Brand Meaning
with Organization
Source: Berry (2000)
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Journal of Services Marketing
Volume 30 · Number 1 · 2016 · 3–6
when I spent a sabbatical leave studying service at the Mayo
Clinic. For the past several years, I have conducted primary
research on how to improve service quality in cancer care and
have begun to publish on this topic (Berry et al., 2015). I am
far more prepared now to write the kind of paper I wrote in
1987. I have chosen four additional ideas that reflect the
primary intention of the original paper – to propose ideas that
would strengthen the foundation of the field.
Compete on value rather than price
The best organizations give customers reasons other than just
price to care about their services. Price, the most easily
imitated element of the marketing mix, is part of value but not
its equivalent. Value equals the benefits customers receive in
exchange for the burdens – financial and non-financial – they
endure. Low prices do not automatically create high value. A
customer’s financial burden may be low, but the non-financial
burden may be high. A long wait at checkout or inadequate
parking, for example, may steer customers to a competitor.
Delivering strong value involves increasing the most salient
benefits and decreasing the most onerous burdens to target
markets. Investing in ongoing strategic innovation to increase
benefits and ongoing operational innovation to decrease
burdens creates sustainable differentiation and customer
commitment (Berry, 2011).
Meet and then exceed customers’ service expectations
Essential in delivering high-quality service includes is service
reliability and pleasant surprise. Reliability is the most
important service dimension in meeting customers’ service
expectations and pleasant surprise enables exceeding them.
Reliability is the center pole of service quality. Customers
enter a market for a reason – to be fed, to be entertained and
to be transported. An unreliable service fails to fulfill the
customer’s need.
Customers purchase services before they actually use them.
They pay for the hotel room, airline flight and auto insurance
before experiencing the core service. In effect, service
customers buy a promise of performance without the
opportunity to “kick the tires”. Keeping the promise by being
dependable boosts customers’ confidence in the service
organization’s competence. However, service reliability is
typically not enough to build a strong reputation for service
excellence. Whereas poor reliability undermines customers’
confidence in the organization, consistent reliability is not
enough to exceed their expectations. Service organizations are
supposed to be competent and reliable.
Exceeding expectations requires the element of pleasant
surprise. Service providers who demonstrate uncommon
kindness, caring and effort create a memorable service
performance. The single most important difference between
manufactured goods marketing and services marketing is the
predominance of human interaction in labor-intensive,
interactive services. The cleverest advertising cannot rescue a
service spoiled by a disrespectful service provider. Conversely,
one or more superb service providers can create an experience
so positive that it unleashes a stream of favorable word-
of-mouth (and word-of-mouse) communications. Nine out of
ten Mayo Clinic patients engage in positive word-of-mouth
 Big ideas in services marketing
Leonard L. Berry
(and mouse) communications (Berry and Seltman, 2008);
patients are formidable marketers for the Mayo Clinic.
Save customers time and effort
Time is a finite resource and effort a precious one.
Organizations that can deliver the intended benefits of their
services while reducing the burdens of time and effort will be
more competitive. In a study of market-creating service
innovations, colleagues and I were struck by the decisive role
service convenience played in many of these innovations
(Berry et al., 2006). Google created an online information
department store. Netflix reinvented the movie rental
business, first with its flat-fee DVD-by-mail service and then
by streaming content directly into customers’ homes.
LensCrafters built its retail eyewear chain by preparing
prescription lenses onsite to give customers their new pair of
glasses on the day of purchase, usually within an hour.
The pervasive influence of the Internet on customers’
rising convenience expectations cannot be overestimated.
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What used to be fast is now slow. In particular, the Internet
has transformed many formerly inseparable services into
separable ones. To do banking in 1987, a customer had to
go to the service – the bricks and mortar bank during open
hours – or to an automatic teller machine. Online banking
did not exist but it does now and customers can bank
whenever they wish and wherever they can access a
computer, tablet or smart phone. And so it is with many
other services available online.
Kaiser Permanente Northern California, part of one of
America’s largest and most progressive healthcare
organizations, offers more than 100 Internet, mobile and
video services that enable patients to review general
health information, read personal health records, make
appointments, order refills, securely e-mail clinicians and
engage in a virtual rather than an in-person appointment.
More than 70 per cent of the patients have registered at
kp.org to use the remote services, and internal surveys
reveal widespread patient satisfaction with them. Virtual
patient visits (e-mail, telephone and video) are expected to
surpass its in-person visits in 2016 (Pearl, 2014).
Service organizations need to attend to at least five types of
service convenience by making it easier for customers to
(Berry et al., 2002):
1 make decisions (decision convenience);
2 initiate service performance (access convenience);
3 complete the transaction (transaction convenience);
4 experience the benefits (benefit convenience); and
5 resolve after-sale problems (post-benefit convenience).
Ease of doing business will always be important in services
marketing.
Be generous
Generosity is a critical input to organizational success, a
conclusion I have reached from my studies of high-
performance service organizations. Intuitively, generosity
seems more an outcome than an input. However, in services,
generosity drives success, in part because it nurtures
employees’ engagement in their work and commitment to
5
Journal of Services Marketing
Volume 30 · Number 1 · 2016 · 3–6
serve. Employees are “volunteers” in that an almost inherent
gap exists between the level of energy they can bring to the
service role and the level required to avoid being penalized.
Service effort above this minimum standard is voluntary; it is
an “extra effort”. Generosity with employees inspires their
volunteerism. Selfish companies cannot serve nearly as well as
generous companies.
Effective generosity can inspire not only employees but also
customers and communities, as several recent books
document (Mackey and Sisodia, 2013; Sisodia et al., 2014;
Tindell, 2014). The best companies create “social profit”,
which involves investing resources beyond conventional
business operations to enhance the quality of life in the
community. Service organizations that market intangible
products need to find ways to differentiate themselves from
competitors. Generosity differentiates by creating an
emotional connection between the organization and its
stakeholders. The key is to be effectively generous by making
generosity purposeful, focused and results oriented.
Effectively generous organizations invest synergistically
with their business purpose and focus their resources
toward making a meaningful difference (Berry, 2007).
A dynamic discipline
Services marketing has come into its own in the past three
decades; it is now a recognized dynamic field within the
marketing discipline. The seven fundamentals outlined in
1987 remain basic, but a cadre of bright, diligent scholars and
researchers have contributed new precepts. Their work has
enriched the discipline and taken it in new directions. My
career in services marketing as a professor and researcher has
been rewarding and I am excited about my current studies. In
retrospect, I am impressed by our history and remain as I was
in 1987 – exuberant about our future.
Note
1 The original paper can be read here: http://dx.doi.org/
10.1108/eb059583
References
Berry, L. (1987), “Big ideas in services marketing”, The
Journal of Services Marketing, Vol. 1 No. 1, pp. 5-9.
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The Free Press, New York, NY.
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Drivers of Sustainable Business Success, The Free Press,
New York, NY.
Berry, L. (2000), “Cultivating service brand equity”,
Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Vol. 28 No. 1,
pp. 128-137.
Berry, L. (2007), “The best companies are generous
companies”, Business Horizons, Vol. 50 No. 4, pp. 263-269.
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organizations”, Industrial Marketing Management, Vol. 40
No. 2, pp. 188-189.
Berry, L., Davis, S. and Wilmet, J. (2015), “When the
customer is stressed”, Harvard Business Review, Vol. 93
No. 10, pp. 87-94.
 Big ideas in services marketing
Leonard L. Berry
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academic field – The case of services marketing”, Journal of
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Service Convenience”, Journal of Marketing, Vol. 66 No. 3,
pp. 1-17.
Berry, L. and Seltman, K. (2008), Management Lessons from
Mayo Clinic, McGraw-Hill, New York, NY.
Berry, L., Shankar, V., Parish, J., Cadwallader, S. and
Dotzel, T. (2006), “Creating new markets through service
innovation”, Sloan Management Review, pp. 56-63.
Mackey, J. and Sisodia, R.S. (2013), Conscious Capitalism:
Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business, Harvard Business
School Publishing, Boston, MA.
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Journal of Services Marketing
Volume 30 · Number 1 · 2016 · 3–6
Pearl, R. (2014), “Kaiser Permanente Northern California
current experiences with internet, mobile, and video
technologies”, Health Affairs, Vol. 33 No. 2,
pp. 251-257.
Sisodia, R.S., Sheth, J.N. and Wolfe, D.B. (2014), Firms of
Endearment, 2nd ed., Pearson Education, Upper Saddle
River, NJ.
Tindell, K. (2014), Uncontainable, Grand Central Publishing,
New York, NY.
Corresponding author
Leonard L. Berry can be contacted at: berryle@tamu.edu