Part 1 Based on the extract below, propose four (4) strategies of tangibilization. List and provide an in-depth description of the four (4) strategies.

Part 2 Find four (4) companies, each of which is using one (1) of the different strategies of tangibilization. Provide a brief background on each company and list which strategy they use.

Part 3 For each of the four (4) companies, describe how they use their strategy to further develop customer relationships by way of their services advertising program.

Use Association, Physical Representation, Documentation, and Visualization Leonard Berry and Terry Clark propose four strategies of tangibilization: association, physical representation, documentation, and visualization.10 Association means linking the service to a tangible person, place, or object. Physical representation means showing tangibles that are directly or indirectly part of the service, such as employees, buildings, or equipment. Documentation means featuring objective data and factual information. Visualization is a vivid mental picture of a services benefits or qualities, such as showing people on vacation having fun. Our Strategy Insight shows how marketing communication icons can be used as tangibles.

Feature Service Employees in CommunicationCustomer contact personnel are tangible representations of the service and are an important second audience for service advertising.11 Featuring actual employees doing their jobs or explaining their services in advertising is effective for both the primary audience (customers) and the secondary audience (employees) because it communicates to employees that they are important. Furthermore, when employees who perform a service well are featured in marketing communication, they become standards for other employees behaviors.

Earlier in this chapter, we discussed five aspects of intangibility that make service marketing communication challenging. In Exhibit 14.1, Mittal describes strategies that can be used in service advertising to overcome these properties. Through careful planning and execution, the abstract can be made concrete, the general can be made specific, the nonsearchable can be made searchable, and the mentally impalpable can be made palpable.

Recommendations and opinions from other customers are virtually always more credible than firm communications. In situations in which consumers have little information prior to purchasesomething that occurs far more often in services than in goods because services are high in experience and credence propertiespeople turn to others for information rather than to traditional marketing channels. Service advertising and types of promotion can generate word-of-mouth communication that extends the investment in paid communication and improves the credibility of the messages.

Use Buzz, or Viral, MarketingBuzz marketing, also called viral marketing, involves the use of real consumers to spread the word about products without (or without the appearance of) being paid by the company. Sometimes buzz marketing occurs simply because customers are avid fans of the service, and sometimes the company seeds customers with services or products. Chipotle Mexican Grill, a Denver-based company with nearly 600 outlets, avoids advertising and instead depends almost completely on the word-of-mouth communication its customers spread about its unique and tasty food. Chipotles founder, M. Steven Ells, makes giving away samples of its food (as well as satisfying customers) the basis for its strategy. For example, when the chain opened a midtown Manhattan outlet in 2006, it gave burritos away to 6,000 people. Even though this cost the company $35,000, the strategy created 6,000 satisfied spokespeople.12

Leverage Social MediaSocial mediainteractive communication among customers on the Internet through such sites as Twitter, YouTube, and Facebookare becoming avenues for consumers to exchange information. The growth of social media is affecting many aspects of consumer purchase behavior. In a comScore survey, almost 28 percent of consumers reported that social media influenced their decisions about holiday purchasing in 2009.13 Another study showed that 61 percent of consumers rely on online ratings and reviews before making a purchase. And 26 percent of consumers post online ratings and reviews.14 According to a Nielsen study, a full 90 percent of consumers trust recommendations from other consumers versus 56 percent who trust brand advertising.15 While social media are not controllable by the firm, the company can monitor the media and understand what consumers are saying and recommending. Formal methods and sophisticated technologies are being developed to track, monitor, and analyze online communication for brands. Nielsen BuzzMetrics, the innovator of this approach, gathers brand information online by trolling millions of lines of Internet communication to find out how customers feel about brands, how many are talking online, what issues they are discussing, how marketing is being viewed, and how efforts to affect word-of-mouth communications are being received. The service provides industry norms and benchmarks to the companies who buy their service as well as real-time alerts about issues.16