Service Marketing

Triangle.
.
Figure 11.2
The Services Marketing Triangle
Company
(Management)

Internal External
Marketing Marketing
enabling setting
promises promises

Employees Interactive Marketing Customers

keeping promises
Source: Adapted from Mary Jo Bitner, Christian Gronroos, and Philip Kotler
 Thismodel with Grönroos’ idea of where
the marketing functions reside and how
they should be implemented

 Thismodel shows the three marketing

functions important for service firms and how
they are divided between the different actors

   These
three marketing functions are internal
marketing, interactive marketing and external
marketing.
 According to Grönroos the internal marketing has to be
managed by the company’s leadership, the interactive
marketing happens between the employees and the clients
and the external marketing is what takes place between the
company’s management and the clients.

 For the service marketing in knowledge-intensive companies,

parts of some other theories, which are related to service
marketing theory, are also important: relationship
marketing and corporate culture.
 The firm is the management including full-time
marketers and salespeople who give promises to the
customers and have to enable the promise through
continuous development and internal marketing
with their employees. This internal marketing is
a prerequisite for external and interactive marketing
and can be reached through attractive and
stimulating places of work, together with good
internal communication.
 The employees are those working in close contact to the
customers, also called part- time marketers . They are
the ones who conduct the interactive marketing.

  The customer, is exposed to the external marketing,

which parallels marketing communication and the
traditional function of marketing. It is aiming to inform
and to survey it.
Internal Marketing
 The internal marketing function is the basic prerequisite
that the project workers should fulfill in order to be
effective in their work. According to Grönroos the
meaning of internal marketing is that the management in
a hierarchical organization has to develop, from the top,
motivated and customer-conscious employees. It refers
to all those planned and unplanned activities the firm
carries out to train, motivate and reward its employees so
that they are able and willing to deliver the promise
which the external marketing function communicates to
the customers.
 The authors pronounce the need of training the personnel
and making them aware of their basic marketing
philosophy in order to fulfill this internal marketing: “
continuous training of the employees is important.

 Besides the specific and planned training of the

employees, unplanned activities are crucial for internal
marketing to work. What this means is that these are
factors that are not necessarily based on any planned or
conscious articulation or strategy.
Interactive Marketing
 Interactive marketing is divided into three phases,
which merge into one another. The first phase begins
with a first contact, goes over to the project-phase and
ends in after-sales, which hopefully leads to new first
contacts. This division is the basis for the analysis of
the interactive marketing. 
 The core idea is the importance of face-to-face contact

between client and project worker and the aim of

building networks of relations for maintaining and
creating possible future assignments.
 Thus, the building of relations, networks of relations is
crucial for the success of project workers and their
companies.
 In the second phase the actual service delivery takes
place, this is where the project is conducted and the
project worker is in contact with the client all the time. In
order to strengthen the relation to the client after the
delivery, relationship marketing is needed. Positive
results of successful interactive marketing are long- term
relations, networks of contacts and positive word-of-
mouth.
 Word-of-mouth is comments or recommendations that
former clients make about their service experiences to
others. This is a powerful tool of indirect marketing,
much more effective than advertising and promotion,
which is direct marketing. Closing the circle again, this
implies that word-of-mouth results often from loyal
clients who make recommendations which triggers new
first contacts and maybe also new projects with existing
clients.
 “Positive word-of-mouth can act as a powerful and highly
credible selling agent.”
 All the time, social relations play a vital role, which
underlines the central role of the service personnel,
effective communication, planned and unplanned.
 Planned communication is information for the client,

education about what is going to be delivered and

communication with existing clients in order to
reinforce loyalty and secure repeat sales. Unplanned
communication can be anything that employees say,
how they say it, how they behave, how physical
resources look like .
External Marketing

 “Anything that communicates to the customer

before service delivery can be viewed as part
of this external marketing function.”
 Marketing communication happens between the
firm and its customers. Tools of this external
marketing are mass communication, brochures,
sales and web sites.
 
 Additionally to this marketing communication
between the firm and the customers, sense of
market research is needed. 
 Traditional marketing is originally based on the
idea that the seller is not the marketer. It considers
market research and product development for an
effective strategy making.
 The classical role of the marketer is to
analyze the market and provide supporting
 documents for the decision takers and

strategy makers in the organization

Ways to Use the
Services Marketing Triangle

 Overall Strategic  Specific Service

Assessment Implementation
◦ How is the service ◦ What is being promoted
organization doing on all and by whom?
three sides of the ◦ How will it be delivered
triangle? and by whom?
◦ Where are the ◦ Are the supporting
weaknesses? systems in place to
◦ What are the strengths? deliver the promised
service?
Thank you