Service Watch

SERVICE WATCH

Reinvestigating the nature of tangibility/intangibility and its influence on consumer experiences

Natasha Jimena González Rodríguez

Tecnológico de Monterrey

This article is about tangibility and intangibility and how these concepts are useful because it influences how a consumer acts in the purchase process and how he/she experiences the service, scholarships have been arguing about removing tangibility/intangibility so this article’s purpose it’s to demonstrate how important are these concepts and how they should be seen in a different perspective that has to be with the consumer behavior and not only with the characteristics of the offerings, so it explains that tangibility and intangibility can not only be defined as palpability or impalpability, whereas the main goal of the article is consumer perception.

As we’ve seen in the course tangibility and intangibility is one of the main things that should have on mind before giving a service and how they are very useful in order to be able to deliver a good service, this article has everything to do with our course since we learned from the first beginning that services are not 100% tangible nor intangible, but we’ve seen these concepts in a brief way and in how this terms affect the offering of a service, we’ve seen that it’s a lot difficult to evaluate an intangible service than a tangible one, because you can’t be pretty sure of how the service was delivered but basing on your experience, so we’ve seen a little of both, the firm’s side and the consumer’s side, but we didn’t see the three dimensions of tangibility (physicality, endurance and purchase motive) and intangibility (physical intangibility, mental intangibility and generality), that leads to the main argument of this article, “It’s all about the consumer perception”, which leads to the Gap Model seen in class, the perception of the consumer about a service and how close is that perception to their expectation. One of the main...