Let us just think about the specificity of services : how to manage, and how to implement a much more efficient marketing and strategy for a service company.
In order to set the scene for the topic on which I am going to speak I will have to give you a few details about SAS Service Partner. The Catering Company which today operates under the name SAS Service Partner was established in 1961 as SAS Catering It was and still is wholly owned by SAS. The new company took over all SAS's catering operations which mainly consisted of inflight catering to SAS and a number of other airlines out of Stockholm, Oslo and Copenhagen. Since then we have developed considerably in Scandinavia and at airports around the world. Our core business is production and distribution of meals.
The basis of my paper concerns the development of Service Management Strategies. With this in mind, my presentation is split into three distinct parts.
The purpose of this paper is to give some guidelines of how one can set suitable levels of service components. It is too much to say that we will present a methodology for this purpose. We provide some indications of what can be done. In the paper we will empirically focus on the employee resource. It is though clear that our way of dealing with the problem has more general applicability. The paper is arranged in the following way. We will continue by discussing some aspects of quality in services. After this we will briefly cover three independent studies, where we point out that a high standard of the personnel does not convey value or utility to consumers in the expected way. This leads to a discussion on how one can assess quality levels, in order to achieve more successful results in operating a service business.
NOVACTION'S PERCEPTOR SYSTEM comprises marketing models and an experience database. The models provide an analytic framework for understanding the contributions of brand positioning and marketing mix to consumers' brand preferences and purchasing behaviour. The experience database maintains key records from historic projects so that global positioning analogies can be studied and strategies designed . In this paper, the modelling framework of PERCEPTOR is outlined in the context of a typical service market, and positioning principles relating to strategic issues in service markets are drawn from the system's experience database. The author suggests that database principles provide valuable ground rules for defining business strategy and that this is particularly relevant in the service sector where actionable forward planning plays such a crucial role in successful business development.
Nowadays there are a lot of measuring methods which allow us to control various marketing-measures and to estimate their chances of success. Product testing, work with test markets and the more conventional methods of research in markets and motivations are reducing the risks for the enterprises. On the other hand, media-research, copy-tests and the measuring of advertising effectiveness and a few of sophisticated techniques in the marketing-communication-area give us quite a lot of data which are rather significant. All these results don't guarantee the final success in business, but make it more probable. INFRATEST Munich made various studies on these subjects. Their aim was to measure this service-behaviour, the influence of particular factors and to quantify the results. In doing so an opportunity for a general improvement of service-behaviour was created, which allowed interested firms to make corrections and improvements on the basis of empiric data. Three studies will be presented here. The first one took place in self-service-shops for food and was carried out in co-operation with the dipl.oec.publ. Roland Berger International Marketing Consultants. The second study was directed to female shop assistants in retail-business-shops of the brassiere and corset branch. The third study took place in travel-agencies. Detailed statements will be given separately for each study; at first, however, some observations about the method, which is similar for all three studies.