Selling the Invisible summary

In many ways, services are very different from physical products. For example, they can't be seen or touched, nor can they be mass-produced. This makes them very difficult to market effectively.

Traditionally, the product being sold plays a large role in marketing, but in the case of services the "product" is largely invisible. Marketing is easier when there’s a physical product to sell, as customers like to see what they are able to buy. This is why companies with easily identifiable products – for example, Porsche – concentrate on image-heavy advertising where the product takes center stage.

Customers today expect better services than they did in the past. Companies like McDonald’s raised the bar by being cleaner, faster and more consistent than their predecessors. Likewise, it is vital that your service is up to the standard in your industry. If you fall behind your competitors or have constant quality issues, you’ll lose customers. To be competitive, you need to ensure customers see your service as high-quality.

But how do you evaluate the quality of your service?

When a customer shops for a physical product like a car, it’s easy for them to see the differences between models: each one looks completely different.

Services are a different story: Because they lack these visual elements, it's harder to tell them apart. Therefore, in order to distinguish your service from your competitors, it's important to set yourself apart in other ways.

Many businesses, both large and small, practice strategic planning. This means that they carefully define both their future goals and the path they'll take to get there. However, despite its popularity, this planning can only take a business so far. 

In fact, obsessive planning has many limitations.

Companies typically spend huge amounts of their resources on researching, planning and implementing the perfect marketing strategy to get customers interested in their business.

Yet, this careful marketing strategy is often undone by problems in other areas. For example, a single rude shop assistant in a retail chain can have a huge effect on sales, regardless of the company's advertising, pricing strategy or the products themselves.

How do people choose what products and services to buy?

You might think that purchases are driven by reason and logical factors like price and quality, but in fact customers often choose their products based on irrational factors.

For your service to be successful, you need to build yourself a specific focus and position. It is perhaps best to think of these in the following way: think of position as how people perceive you, or, in other words, the external view of your business; think of focus as the internal view, or how you perceive and understand yourself.

But how do you build both of these?

Price is a strong communicator about the quality and value of a service. There are few things more important in marketing than pricing, but how should you price your service?

Logic would dictate that customers always go for the lowest price. However, this is rarely the case.

Imagine you are hungry after a long day of driving and you enter an unfamiliar town in search of somewhere to eat. Instead of choosing the first restaurant you see, you – like many of us – would probably continue driving until you spotted a branded service like Burger King or McDonald’s. This is because certain brands promise a high standard of service; a brand is something like an insurance against poor quality. People feel more comfortable choosing recognizable brands as they know what to expect.

If you want to be successful, you should develop your service into a brand. But how do you do this?

A story isn't always a work of fiction; in fact, a story can also be a message that creates a picture of your brand. Just as lawyers will use stories to vividly illustrate complex arguments in trials, marketers can use them to build up a positive picture of a brand for customers.

Yet, to create a good story, marketers must ensure that the message follows certain key principles. 

The main message in this book:

Marketing services can be challenging, but it's very important in today's economy. The heart of any service-marketing effort is the service itself, as well as its focus and position, as these empower things like branding and reputation. As services are not tangible, they are best promoted through clear and consistent messages that tell a compelling story about the company.

Work on making your service great before you start anything else.

Service quality is very important to service marketing. It is hard to promote or advertise a service that's lacking in quality.