Branding Services

Branding Strategies for Service Brands

The approaches, strategies, and techniques for creating a brand for a services business requires an entirely different skill set and approach vs. those used by manufacturers and other companies who produce tangible products. First, services are by nature intangible; which in reality creates not the service upon the sales but the commitment to deliver a service in the future. As a result of this, the issue of trust is much more important in branding services over tangible products. The role of trust is so critical that it is one of the primary areas of how branding for services is created. Using trust as a foundation, branding of services needs to address the variations and changing levels of quality delivered, and also needs to invite the consumer to become involved with the service actively to appreciate it. This second point can be seen when an airline customer chooses to upgrade to first class and the airline can use the persons' frequent flyer miles to complete the transaction at no charge. The customer needed to be involved with the transaction and immediately has a higher level of loyalty to the airline for completing the upgrade at no cost, except for the mileage deduction for their account. Without the customer being involved there would not be a successful service transaction. Third, there needs to be a continual refresh of the value of the service for it to be used over again. If the airline customer had been bumped from the flight even though they were a frequent flyer and been promised an upgrade, chances are the person flying would be very hesitant to fly again. The bottom line of this example and the branding of services in general is that trust is critical as the part of any brand, and execution on services to support that trust is critical for any service business. (Kelly 1998) states in Financial Times that the role of the trusted advisor as part of services branding influences 70% of all purchases by companies.

Reference:

Kelly (1998) - Paying for that old brand magic: Marketing branding professional services, Financial Times, August 12, 1998.