On the Intangibility of Services

Abstract

Whenever marketing researchers and practitioners apply the specifics of their discipline to the service sector, one concept always crops up like a leitmotif: intangibility. The realities it designates, however, are seldom specified. As a result, this concept has many different meanings in the specialised literature on services. Not only does this vagueness have semantic drawbacks, it also obscures the marketing analysis of the supplier/customer relationship. This article's objective is to contribute to removing these ambiguities. In the first part it seeks to define the concept of the term ‘intangibility’, and to show its importance in the general theory and practice of marketing. In the second part, the marketing analysis of a service shows the role of intangible elements in the relationship between service supply and demand, before broadening. In the third part, their impact on strategic implications and further theoretical problems is shown.