Promotion Of Services

About the Guest Editor Dr Marla Royne Stafford is on the marketing faculty at the University of Memphis. Prior to joining the University of Memphis, Dr Stafford was an associate professor of marketing at the University of North Texas. She received her PhD from the University of Georgia. Dr Stafford’s research interests include advertising, services and marketing on the World Wide Web. She has published over 60 articles, chapters and conference proceedings, in journals such as the Journal of Services Marketing, Journal of Advertising, Journal of Retailing, Journal of Business Research, and the Journal of Current Issues and Research in Advertising. Dr Stafford is an active member of the American Academy of Advertising (AAA) and has served as a member of the AAA Executive Committee, Chair of the Publications Committee and editor of the AAA Newsletter. Dr Stafford is an award winning researcher and teacher, having been the recipient of such awards as the University of North Texas university-wide Honor Professor Award for outstanding teaching, the PDI Research Fellowship Award, and the Developing Scholars Award, among others. In 1998, Dr Stafford was identified in the Journal of Advertising as one of the leading publishers in the top advertising journals. Continuing challenges face the increasing number of service providers in our economy. In a presentation to a distinguished panel of academics, Parasuraman (1995) identified a number of those issues within the context of the classic four Ps of marketing. In particular, the subject of promotion, the ‘‘P’’ associated with communication, emerged as a critical area for services research. Clearly, the characteristics that define service offerings contribute to the need for services to develop their own body of understanding on how to effectively communicate its offerings to its market. It is this unique need that spawned this special issue of the Journal of Services Marketing. Service marketers face a number of challenges when promoting their offerings. For example, services need to understand the myriad promotional tools available to their businesses to increase tangible cues, use those cues effectively and promote service quality. The promotional mix has traditionally included advertising, sales promotion, personal selling and public relations (O’Guinn et al., 2000), with more recent tools such as direct marketing and the Internet growing in popularity for both goods and services. The now ubiquitous philosophy of integrated marketing communications (IMC), where the diverse promotional tools come together into an integrated whole, is yet another critical area of investigation for effectively promoting services (Tripp, 1997). Given the lack of concreteness for most services, an effective IMC strategy may prove to be a strong tool in overcoming intangibility The problem of intangibility remains, although new theoretical approaches to the subject are emerging to help service