Stepping into a service mindset Series Post 3 of 4
This four-part series offers a look at the rise of services and three tips for brands looking to understand some basics about the service revolution that is underway.
Think of some of your favorite memories. Chances are they are fleeting, intangible. You can’t see, touch or replicate them, but they make you who you are today. For brands, delivering services can feel similarly intangible, yet is equally essential to the brand’s legacy.
Delivering a service is about creating value for another human being, yet human beings are unpredictable. As Grönroos argues, “We know very little about the process of value creation, when it starts, what it includes, when it ends.” How customers experience value is so individualistic, experienced by everyone in his or her own way. (2011).
Think of the car example used in the last blog post. The value of a part (which equals a functioning car) may be different for different people. For some, value may be listening to the purr of the motor, for another it may mean the ability to pick the kids up from school. Multiply these unique ways to experience the value from your service by your 1,000 or 100,000 customers and the task of looking at your brand as a service begins to feel insurmountable. (Truth be told, this is the point where many companies turn back.)
How do you get comfortable with intangibility and use it to your strategic advantage? Ojasalo and Ojasalo propose the way to do this is to design your service with customers, not merely for customers. They reference Standvik et al. (2012) saying, “This kind of an approach helps in diagnosing and revealing the customers’ mental models and to form a picture of their needing and then translating the needing into an offering that truly matches the needing.” (2014)