Productizing Your Service
The key difference between marketing a service and marketing a product is that services sell
an intangible. When you buy a product you can see the workmanship and
the packaging ... and thus easily get a good feel for it's perceived value as compared to a
competitive product.
But when it comes to services, prospects have more difficulty evaluating the relative value.
Competing service providers all seem to offer the same thing. They all use words like quality, personal
attention, and value. So you sell a promise, and the prospect perceives risk. Productizing
your service is designed to reduce your client's perceived risk.
The first step in productizing is to know what makes you different from your competitors.
The second step is to understand that, from your client's perspective, your product is comprised of
two parts... the output or result, AND, the process of fulfillment. Results can be
communicated easily. But with respect to the process or the experience ...
until a client has used your service, there's no way for them to know what to expect.
Productizing is part incentive, part packaging, and mostly communicating a set of expectations
about the process and outcome. A good illustration of productizing
is the fancy brochures that colleges send out. These are more than brochures...
they create image and give substance to an intangible...an education. But when my college recruited me,
they added another step in productizing their service... They sent a senior student
to spend an afternoon with me to describe what college life would be like.
When you think of packaging your service, think of the initial marketing materials, but don't forget
the leave behinds. Like the chocolate on the hotel bed, or the graduation diploma,
the leave behind indicates completion of the service...but it is also a powerful advertising tool.
For one of the first companies I incorporated, the attorney we used
provided me with a very high end binder to hold all the papers. That binder got the
attorney more than one referral from associates of mine who saw it and asked about it.
So don't forget the leave behind.