Presentation

"The role of intangibility and inseparability within services."

Intro

Hey guys, so the topic we have been given is the role of intangibility and
inseparability within services.

intangibility

A service is essentially a performance, which is where the characteristic of
intangibility comes from. Unlike a good, we cannot touch, see, taste nor smell the
service we are being provided. An example of this is a burger versus dentistry
service. We can physically see and hold the burger, but not the performance by
the dentist.

Although services are intangible, they do have a few tangible aspects, which are
called search qualities. This basically means that we can judge the quality of the
service prior to consuming it. But in the end, this is like judging a book by the
cover; do we really know what the service is like until we actually consume it?

Services are always more difficult to assess than goods due to the intangibility
aspect. We can review it after the consumption through out experience, but even
then there are aspects of the service that we cannot judge after the purchase and
consumption, called credence qualities. There are areas the reasonable
consumer is not knowledgeable in, like how do we know what they service
provider has done to fix our phone? We dont. We just know that its fixed. So
how do we judge that service?

All these aspects of intangibility of services make it a very difficult product to
judge.

Inseparability

A service is also impossible to separate production from consumption, called the
inseparability characteristic.

This means that a service must be produced whilst simultaneously being
consumed. Consumers are so involved in the production of services that it is very
difficult to produce the service without the consumers presence, hence the
inseparability of services production and consumption.

An example: