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Services marketing theory suggests that product and services marketers may employ different advertising strategies. In this article, we content-analyzed 760 television commercials for products, services, and retail outlets in order to determine whether the objectives or strategies employed differ. Three frameworks are described and used to evaluate the product and service advertisements. The results indicate that services, retail, and product marketers are using different advertising strategies. Many of the differences appear to be related to the simultaneity, heterogeneity, and intangibility of services.
DIFFERENCES BETWEEN PRODUCT AND SERVICES TELEVISION COMMERCIALS
In 1990, $6.8 billion was spent advertising services on television.(6) This amount reflects 30 percent of the total expenditures for television advertising. A number of authors have identified characteristics that differentiate services marketing from product marketing.(3, 5, 9) Four characteristics frequently mentioned are intangibility, simultaneity of production and consumption, heterogeneity, and perishability. Given the prevalence of these four characteristics among services, it would not be surprising to find that service and product advertisements differ from each other in significant ways.
One way to develop an understanding of marketing is by observing what practices are actually engaged in by marketers. This type of knowledge development is referred to as "theory-in-use".(7) According to this approach, management practice and experience are used as a basis to generate theories about phenomena of interest.
It is our belief that knowing the objectives and methods employed by service providers can assist other service providers in formulating advertising strategies. This article will report the results of a content-analysis which examined the similarities and differences between product and service television commercials.(11)
MODELS FOR EVALUATING COMMERCIALS
The comparison of advertisements used three models: the hierarchy-of-effects model, the informational/transformational dichotomy, and Hefzallah and Maloney's categories for television commercials.
HIERARCHY-OF-EFFECTS MODEL
Hierarchy-of-effects models of communication postulate that purchase behavior occurs as a follow-up to an ordered series of prebehavioral responses.(11) The basic model specifies a response sequence with each step of the hierarchy being a necessary but insufficient condition for the succeeding step.(10) The response sequence consists of three stages: cognition, affect, and behavior. While the precise order of this sequence may vary according to such variables as customer involvement or media employed, the learning hierarchy is one of the most commonly discussed models in advertising. In...