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Keywords Services marketing, Sustainable development, Development
Abstract There is a window of opportunity within the area of design for sustainability for services marketing academics and practitioners to offer their knowledge and experience to manufacturing companies and academics. Over the last decade there has been a growing interest in services within the field of sustainable development. Services are viewed as a dematerialized alternative to existing products, with reduced environmental impact (i.e. less material and less energy use to fulfil a certain need). The services considered by academics in the field of sustainable development are those related to products or those substituting products. These services are often called "ecoefficient services". Academics focusing on the development of eco-efficient services can use elements of theory and experience available within the services marketing discipline. Services marketing academics and practitioners can help in developing blueprints and processes to facilitate manufacturing companies to shift towards a more service-intensive way of doing business. This paper calls for cross-disciplinary collaboration.
Introduction
Approximately 25 years ago the marketing discipline changed, with services breaking free from product marketing through the work of services marketing pioneers like Rathmell (1966), Shostack (1977), Gronroos (1978), Zeithaml (1981), and Lovelock (1983). This change was born out of recognition that the classical product marketing literature did not do justice to the unique qualities of services. Services had distinctive characteristics which made them fundamentally different from products, e.g. their intangible nature, the inseparability of production and consumption, their heterogeneity, perishability, and a different concept of ownership (Gabbott and Hogg, 1997). Thus, the services marketing discipline emerged. Since then a great deal of work has been undertaken to manage the implications of these distinctive characteristics of services (e.g. Payne, 1993; Zeithaml and Bitner, 1996; Lovelock and Wright, 1999) such as controlling service quality, customer satisfaction, customer expectations, communication of services, and internal marketing, among others.
Over the last eight years another field has acknowledged the consequences of the different nature of services and products: the field of sustainable development. Since the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, guiding concepts for a more sustainable future have been developed (Meijkamp, 2000). One of these concepts is eco-efficiency,...