Service Industry and Quality

Service can be defined as “any primary or complementary activity that does not directly produce a physical product, i.e. the non-goods part of the transaction between the buyer (customer) and seller (provider).” Quality has traditionally been related to the manufacturing industry. Due to the improvements in technology and automation over the last century, more

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Value in the Service Industry

Like their manufacturing counterparts, most successful service organizations have adopted a new model since the 1980s. They shifted the emphasis from financially optimizing assets to customer satisfaction. The emphasis has shifted from emulating old-design manufacturing to making the core technology flexible, highlighting the key role of the front-line employee to satisfy customers. Service standards

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Classification of Services

Schmenner3 categorized services into four categories in the service process matrix as shown in Figure 16.1. The four categories are named service factory, service shop, mass service and professional service. This matrix considers one variable, which is the degree of interaction and customization. The services categorized in service shop and professional services fall within

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Defining Service Quality

Quality is much easier to define when manufacturing tangible products. Manufacturing quality may simply involve conformance to specifications. A manufacturer can evaluate the level of a product’s quality based on what was produced relative to the design specifications. A defect occurs when a product fails to meet set specifications. The specifications come from product

The SERVQUAL Model

Measuring the quality of a service can be a very difficult exercise. Unlike products where there are particular specifications such as length, depth, width, weight, colour, a service can have numerous intangible or qualitative specifications. In addition, there is the expectation of the customer with regard to the service, which can vary considerably based

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Hospitality Sector

Hospitality is about serving the guests so that they experience a “feel-good-effect.” Today, the hospitality sector is one of the fastest growing sectors in India. It is expected to grow at the rate of 8 per cent between 2007 and 2016. Many renowned global players in the hospitality industry are coming to India to

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Improving the Service Quality

Parasuraman, Berry and Zeithaml maintain that the following nine lessons are essentials for improving service quality across service industries: Listening: Understand what customers really want through continuously listening to the expectation and perceptions of existing customers and potential customers. Reliability: Reliability is the single-most important dimensions of service quality and must be a service

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The Elements of Entry Strategy

Entry strategy for international markets is a comprehensive plan. It sets forth the objectives, goals, resources, and policies that will guide a compa­ny’s international business operations over a future period long enough to achieve sustainable growth in world markets. For most companies the entry-strategy time horizon is from three to five years, because it

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Classification of Entry Modes

An international market entry mode is an institutional arrangement that makes possible the entry of a company’s products, technology, human skills, management, or other resources into a foreign country. For a domes­tic company already located in the country that contains its market, the question of entry mode as distinguished from market entry (the marketing

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Factors Influencing the Choice of the Entry Mode

A company’s choice of its entry mode for a given product/target country is the net result of several, often conflicting, forces. The variety of forces, difficulties in measuring their strength, and the need to anticipate their direction over a future planning period combine to make the entry mode decision a complex process with numerous

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Dynamics of Entry Mode Decisions

Once started in international business, a company will gradually change its entry mode decisions in a fairly predictable fashion. Increasingly, it will choose entry modes that provide greater control over foreign marketing operations. But to gain greater control, the company will have to commit more resources to foreign markets and thereby assume greater market

The International Marketing Plan

The design of a company’s market entry strategy for a given product/target country requires the formulation of a marketing plan as well as the choice of an entry mode. The entry mode is intended to penetrate the foreign Table 3 Stages in the International Evolution of a Manufacturing Company target country; the marketing plan

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A Logical Flow Model of the Entry Decision Process

Figure 4 presents a logical flow model of the entry decision process. In the remainder of this text, we shall flesh out this model, with the intent of helping managers make better decisions. Source: Root Franklin R. (1998), Entry Strategies for International Markets, Jossey-Bass; 2nd

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Target International Market

In planning international market entry strategies, managers are striving to match products against markets. Which products shall we market abroad? To which countries? These are the two key questions at the start of the planning process. It follows that decisions on international products and markets involve the simultaneous determination of a candi­date product and

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Choosing the Candidate Product

The most critical element in planning international market entry strategies is the choice of the product. A company with a single product needs only to decide whether that product is a suitable candidate for international market entry, that is, a product with good enough prospects to warrant an investi­gation of foreign markets. But the

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Adapting Products for International Markets

Manufacturers may need to adapt their products to foreign markets to gain a desired level of buyer acceptance. Adaptation may be called for in the physical product, the way in which the physical product is identified and presented to final buyers (product package), or the way in which the use of the physical product

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Preliminary Screening of Country Markets

After choosing the candidate product, company managers can turn to the identification of the country market with the highest sales potential. We discuss the process of deciding on the foreign target market according to the model presented in Figure 7. In this section we consider the first phase of the model: preliminary screening. The

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Estimating Industry Market Potentials

After preliminary screening, the next stage of the target market selection model depicted in Figure 7 is a more refined estimate of the market poten­tials for the candidate generic product in the comparatively small number (say, 15) of prospective target countries. We define industry market potential as the most probable total sales of a

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Estimating Company Sales Potentials

We define company sales potential as the most probable sales of a compa­ny’s product in a designated country over a strategic planning period, given assumptions with respect to entry mode and marketing effort.8 Company sales potential may also be viewed as a company’s most probable share of a country’s industry market potential. CSP depends

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Exporting as a Learning Experience

To go international for the first time, a company must overcome anxieties about its ability to compete in foreign markets. The neophyte international firm, therefore, is more concerned with minimizing international market and political risks than with maximizing control over international market­ing operations. Given this situation, exporting will usually appear to the manufacturer as

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