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Branding Services- What Lies Behind the Wizard's Curtain
~Nisha Ghanshani

From an historical perspective, services always developed in civilizations before products did. Then came the industrial revolution and products dominated the marketplace. However, history is famous for repeating itself and therefore in the new economy, services have begun to reclaim their share of the consumer's money once again.

However, this reinvention and resurrection of the service economy has not been supported adequately by theoretical studies on service marketing. This is because the majority of marketing literature post the industrial revolution was dedicated towards marketing of products.

Due to lack of adequate academic information on the subject, service marketers have had to face many challenges in the marketplace, unguided. But, many of them have succeeded and today some of the best brands in the world are service brands. So how did they do it?

Leo Tolstoy once said that all happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Similarly, all successful brands are alike; each unsuccessful brand is unsuccessful in its own way. Thus we can conclude that there surely exist some common traits that can be observed in each one of these successful service brands. While one could go on and on, drawing a million comparisons between the various successful service brands, there seems to emerge one common mantra that they all adopted for branding services.

The mantra in question is the 4-M approach. This mantra breaks down the process of service brand management into managing of 4 specific attributes. This makes the planning, implementing and evaluation of any marketing scheme relatively simple and straightforward.

The 4-M approach centers on the 4 basic elements that a service provider must manage for branding services effectively. In a nutshell the 4-M approach involves

1. Managing Egos- People always react negatively when they perceive a threat. Also, research has shown that more than the physical threat; it is threat to one's sense of self-one's ego that elicits the most negative response. Thus managing egos is important in maintaining healthy and positive relationships with the company's customers-both internal as well as the external. Only if the internal customers (employees) feel safe and do not perceive any threat to their egos, will they provide superior service to the external customers.
   
2. Managing Perceptions- Brands are not static but are continuously evolving and changing with changing customer perceptions. Thus, a brand is not simply the promise of said quality but is in fact a manifestation of consumer perceptions of that promise- whether they see it as useful or not, truthful or not, consistent or not etc. Thus, managing perceptions of both internal and external customers is crucial in branding services.
   
3. Managing Attitudes- What people think about you matters! In any service, people are the walking billboards of the company. As primary service providers they interact with customers directly to deliver the service. What they think about the company is invariably reflected in the service they deliver. Thus, managing their opinions is critical in branding services. Also, each satisfied customer can direct another ten prospects towards your service. This word-of mouth publicity which is unique to the service industry can only be leveraged if your customers think highly of you as a service provider.
   
   
4. Managing Awareness- Goods have the advantage of ocular presence and physical existence. This tangibility helps consumers to first experience the product through the various senses, build a perception about the same and then decide to buy or not. However, in the case of services, the intangibility of the service causes the customer to buy the product and then decide whether it appealed to their senses or not. Branding services therefore becomes extremely tricky since there are very few ways of creating brand awareness and conveying the brand promise to the customers. Nevertheless, managing service awareness, though challenging can be achieved using physical evidence and media. Physical evidence refers to the material touch and feel factors that accompany the service and these are important in conveying the brand promise to the customers. Media on the other hand, is extremely useful in branding services by creating brand awareness.

[The picture used in this article has been taken from the photo library of stock.xchng.]

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