Product vs. Service Marketing

Product versus Service Marketing

Louis J. Toto

Oklahoma Wesleyan University

Take a position

With a career spanning thirty plus years in the computer services industry, my background and experience with product marketing has been limited. In the traditional roles of post sales service the interfacing with product marketing is limited even more. In today’s technology driven environment, and especially in smaller customer markets it is not uncommon to not even know who the product marketer even is. Several years ago, I moved within the organization from the role of service delivery provider to a service delivery manager. The significance has been in the level of interface with the product marketing team, including the marketing representative and the pre-sales engineer. The role of the pre-sales engineer is to guide the marketing representative and the customer architecture teams through the challenging myriad of product selection, validation, and proof of concept. Understandably the role of service delivery manager has also changed the interface level with the customer. With this background established, it leads me to the position taken for this discussion and in support of the claim that product and service marketing are fundamentally different. According to Kotler, product companies are finding it more challenging to differentiate between the tangible products in marketing mix. Service providers being well versed in delivery, response, and resolution are bring significant profitability to the organization (Kotler & Keller, 2009).

Simple statistics

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the service producing sector will continue to be the dominant employment generator in the economy, adding about 20 million jobs by 2014. Employment in the service producing sector is between the period 2004-2014 is expected to increase by 17%, whereas manufacturing employment is expected to decrease by 5%. These and other statistics have led to a...