How do you market an intangible - something the customer cannot taste, touch, smell, or feel, and can evaluate only as it's experienced? That's the unique problem you face as a marketer in one of the service industries. Add to this basic difficulty the absence of a marketing tradition in most service organizations and the current threat by high-service foreign competitors, and American services marketers have all the challenges they can handle.
The AMA Handbook of Marketing for the Service Industries is an invaluable resource - the most comprehensive analysis ever published on the challenges of services marketing. It incorporates the expertise of forty-one marketing professionals, representing organizations in financial services, transportation, the arts, telecommunications, information services, the hospitality industry, education, and health care, among other service industries. Offering dozens of tested techniques and approaches, the Handbook covers every aspect of creating customer driven strategies and then ensuring that they are implemented.
"Services are largely intangible and experiential," point out the editors. "This intangibility makes the 'product' development process more complex, means that the concept of inventory is largely irrelevant, and suggests that consumers probably have a more difficult time evaluating among service alternatives. Hence, what we know about what works in marketing tangible products needs to be adjusted for services." In this broad-ranging work, you'll learn how to frame your marketing approach to most effectively reach your customers and maintain your competitive advantage. The Handbook is. divided into six sections, each building on the one before it:
1. The link between service quality and leadership
2. The strategic components of a customer-focused organization
3. Internal marketing, or how to mobilize your employees to be customer-conscious
4. Planning
5. Implementation; development, pricing, distribution, communicating about an intangible, using service as a product differentiator
6. A survey of state-of-the-art marketing techniques from eleven different industries

Filled with the hard-won insights of its contributors, The AMA Handbook of Marketing for the Service Industries presents you with the lively ideas, methods, experiences, and examples of seasoned services marketers. You'll learn from these authorities how to apply techniques from service industries other than your own, and how to transform strategic plans into practical approaches. Most important, you'll see how to break out of corporate tunnel vision and transform your division or company into a marketing-driven machine where everyone - from telephone operator to CEO-focuses on the customer.