 As Salaamu Alaikum Khawatinu Hazrat. Wasim As-Sin welcomes you to lecture number 42 of Brand Management, MKT 624, at the virtual University of Pakistan. After having talked about all the steps involved in the branding process, I started talking about the importance of execution of all those steps over the last few lectures. And together you will recall that we talked about the measuring your brand's performance and then about the need to have an organization compatible with achieving those kind of executions. The meaning, the need to have an organization which really enables you to execute all these strategies the way you planned them and the way you crafted them. We know the whole process or the concepts that form that process. We also have the organization. We now get on to the final step. The final step is all about planning your brand, meaning your brand's movement. And the brand's movement is going to be all about execution of the planning that you already have in place. The rest of the lectures are going to be devoted to brand planning. However, before I could move on to how to come up with the rightmost plan under any given circumstances, let me have the opportunity of talking about how you go about branding in services. Those brands, so to say, are the ones I did not really touch upon in detail. I have been giving you the examples here and there in relation to the various concepts, but how to brand a service and leverage that as a branding process is something I'm going to talk about now because I think an understanding of the similarities of the branding process relating services with branding process relating tangible brand products is very important before we start talking about the brand plan. Branding in services is gaining popularity. And let me also tell you that there is no legal distinction between tangible product brands, which I may call TPBs and the service brands, meaning SBs. The distinction between the two areas is just about economic. There are many similarities between service brands and tangible product brands when it comes to the branding process. And I can state that the branding process is just about the same in case of services also. The meaning, you go through a similar kind of product development process which involves developing brand's picture, the brand's promise, the brand's contract, and the brand's positioning. The whole effort in terms of the services also revolves around your positioning concept. There is a growing realization on part of the service sellers that in order to sell and leverage their services, that they've got to get into the concepts of differentiation and segmentation. These two concepts lead to the concept of positioning. And having the right position means that the brand is going to make it smart for the market as long as all strategies are in place. Because you cannot go for the right position unless you really have identified the right segment and given your product some level of differentiation. And then you start communicating that position to the target audience and the process goes on. This is what we all know by now. So in other words, all the service sellers are going to have this realization on their part that they have to have a lot of distinction and differentiation on part of their products in order to stand out of the crowd, meaning in relation to the competition that they have. They all are in a branding age and unless they treat the products that they sell as proper brands, there's no way that those products are going to be leveraged. With the exception of banking insurance and some computer services, most of these services are a combination of products and services. Restaurants for example, airlines, hotels. So what I'm talking about is that while these services are sold, customers do get in contact with the tangible products also, either they get into contact with those products or they use those. Restaurants, you buy something very tangible but it is a service which is sold as the last part of the product. So what is it that really is the difference between the products, meaning tangible products and services. That is something we really have to look into. So in other words, we are going to concentrate on the service element and to see what is it that we need to do in order to brand that. The basic difference lies in relation to four different elements when it comes to branding your services. One is the factor of intangibility. You cannot see a service, you cannot feel it and you cannot touch it. Parishability is the second element, which means that we cannot really store these services like store inventories. The seeds not sold today are lost forever. So that is what is meant by the perishability. Inseparability, a very important element of the services, meaning the one which really differentiates services from tangible products and this means that you really cannot separate services from products. A service is sold at the time it is delivered. So that is what is meant by inseparability. The fourth factor is that of variability. Services are offered by the people who vary in temperament, in behavior and also in their values. So one service offered at one particular time may not be the same when it is offered at a different time by a different person. So these are the basic elements which differentiate services from products. All this can be summarized in two important statements. One is that operations and marketing in case of service selling are more intertwined in comparison with tangible products because they are sold at just about the same time. The banks and restaurants are excellent examples of this statement. The other is that everybody within the organization has got to be educated on the core value of the service which is to be delivered and that calls for the need of internal marketing. So we can see that service selling although it is subject to the same branding process of the brand picture, the brand promise, the brand positioning and all that but then at the same time it may be a little more difficult because of the elements that I have just talked about. What are those difficulties? Let us talk about those one by one. First of all we can say that the services can be copied easily. It is because of this factor that service sellers find it hard to bring about meaningful differentiation when they start marketing their products. For the simple reason that a service product cannot be showed or demonstrated the way a tangible product can be showed and demonstrated and it doesn't really take as much investment to develop a service as it does to develop a tangible product. You have to go through the manufacturing process and what you are supposed to be doing in order to get all that is known to you all. Whereas service selling is something which can be started by just putting up a small office or a small shop and from there you just go on. So this is one of the difficulties involved in selling off services. The second is that the services are hard to summarize and communicate. Why is it hard to summarize the services is again because of the intangibility of services. When you are dealing with the tangible product it can be easily communicated because of the physical features that you really can throw light on and through highlighting those features the communication process becomes easy or it is not as difficult as it is in case of services. It is because of the difficulty of expression that services can generally have slogans. It's not to say that tangible product brands do not have slogans but slogans work more in case of services because it is the only way to express the inner core of the product through an outward expression. And in other words it is only through that expression that we can talk about the service which otherwise cannot be shown or demonstrated. To what extent that expression is appropriate or not appropriate is a separate issue which really brings us back to the concept of positioning. How well it is positioned meaning the product, how well the brand's picture was created and the promise it really carries and the level of differentiation in terms of the benefits which the product offers. All those things could have got to be taken into consideration before you start expressing yourself with the help of a slogan. If the slogan is effective, communication is effective and the service really stands differentiated with a very well positioned into the minds of the consumers. So it is a big challenge when it comes to the selling services. The other problem that we have in terms of the selling services is that the quality is hard to evaluate. Why it is hard to evaluate, it is hard for the consumer who really is not in a position to draw the right most comparison between one service and another service because of intangibility and also because of the variability. The consumer might have a very good experience at one particular point in time and may not have as much good an experience at another point in time. It becomes difficult for the consumers to draw comparisons between different services. It also is kind of difficult for the sellers because they find it hard to communicate. This takes us back to the concept or the difficulty which I talked as the difficulty number one. It really offers the buyers the problem of not being able to size up or judge the value for money when it comes to the brand they buy. And this further leads to pricing problem on the part of the sellers. Only because the customers really are in a fix as to how much value they are getting out of buying one particular service, the sellers find it difficult at times to go for the right most pricing mechanism and the right most pricing point. Another difficulty which is offered by service selling is that of the standardization. This really is one of the most important factors that we really have to keep in mind because the services really start getting hard time in terms of selling when it comes to the problem of standardization. Because of the involvement of the human factor like I talked about earlier, standardizing your routines and procedures becomes a challenge. Now, this is not to say that standardization cannot be brought about. There are different angles from which standardization of routines becomes challenging. The paradox in this area comes in when there is a conflict between the motivation and empowerment. Let me try to explain these two concepts of the motivation and empowerment in the context of problem of standardization. Just assume a person selling a service, sitting in a small office, being highly motivated and selling the service in the most efficient and effective way. Only because he's empowered. When I say he's empowered, that really means that the person has the power to make so many different decisions at this part of the moment to be able to deliver that particular service efficiently and effectively. So the efficiency and effectiveness become a function of motivation and empowerment. Now suppose for a second that this business is growing and it is growing fast. The company or the business has to multiply its selling points and it has to have more people. Not all the people employed by the company are going to be as motivated as that particular person has been. Because of in the first place the nature of different personnel, the difference in behavior in values and so on and so forth and also because the business now has become focused on standardizing routines in order to more effectively manage the operation which is growing fast. To manage all that, you start incorporating so many different standards and that is something I've been talking about in relation to different concepts all over the course and because of those standards what happens is the element of empowerment gets diminished. And the same person who felt so much motivated to deliver that service that efficiently and effectively that he became kind of an example for the whole lot starts feeling little less motivated if not demotivated because he feels that the part of the power he had is slipping away from him. So that is where the challenge of standardizing routines and procedures that comes in when you start selling services. The imposition of controls in other words bring in a conflict between motivation and empowerment. The moment you start prescribing those controls things change and the challenge pops up and you've got to deal with that challenge in a way that the management process still remains very efficient and the people still remain motivated and the service which is sold to your target audience still remains very uniform in terms of its delivery. So that's where the challenge is. Another problem that we face while we sell services is that we cannot store inventories. Unlike tangible product brands you just cannot store services in response to the fluctuating demand levels with the variation in seasons. So what I'm saying is if you are into services and you get into season which is high sales seasons you just cannot store your services in anticipation of the higher level of sales relating that particular season. What you can do is only improve your service to cope with that challenge. An excellent example relating this syndrome that could be event of utility bills. You know how you guys could have to queue up in front of the banks in order to pay your bills. Now this is one example of a seller having a challenge of making sure that customers do not run into that kind of discomfort. An example could also be given in relation to a retail outlet which has stocked various inventories in anticipation of the heat season but then when the shopping pressure builds up the same retail outlet just cannot cope with the payment procedures because of not having a compatible number of cash registers with the number of customers who have walked into the store. So this is a challenge which the service seller has to face and then come up with some ingenious ways of coping with these kind of pressures. Having talked about the problems that service sellers face we must also look into the solutions. Service selling is difficult but then at the same time there are certain solutions which make these problems soluble. What are those solutions? Let us talk about those. The first one is that you have to capitalize on additional elements. What is that? Let me explain. Service selling is not full of handicaps. It might have sounded like that so far but the fact is that while you sell services there are certain elements which are additional elements and those are not there while you sell tangible products and if capitalized the very sensibly and strategically those really give you a competitive advantage in terms of leveraging your brand. Those elements are additional three P's that is the way those could be expressed. The first P stands for people and the second P stands for process and the third P stands for physical evidence. So in other words what we are talking about is the possibility of cashing in on these three additional elements in order to give strength and power to our brand that basically is a service brand. Now let us try to understand what these three additional P's really mean and what really is meant by people and by process and by the physical evidence. Well talking about the people I would like to draw your attention back to the example of the courier. The reason that this particular courier service is the market leader and enjoying a price premium is because of the people it has in place and whatever strength this company has it owes to the quality of the human resource meaning people the company has and the next thing which really comes into the mind is if this company has the people working so efficiently and so effectively they have got to be part of a process which let them to work in a way that they end up being as efficient and as effective that they make the company the market leader. So that is an example of the people and the process. First of all you have to capitalize on the quality of people that you have. When people enter any business not all of them are aces you have different kinds of people and the objective and the challenge before you is to train and educate those people by your standards and I did talk about the problem of standardization in relation to service selling so while it is a problem the businesses also have to look into the opportunity and the ways and means to address to this particular problem and you can address to this particular problem only by educating your people meaning internal marketing and when you carry out internal marketing it is about educating your people in relation to certain systems procedures routines and standards the ones your people are used to those standards and they are following those day in and day out then the quality of service rendered is going to be of a very high quality and we can also say that bringing these elements together the meaning good people and good process which is very well structured and very well defined we really can address the problem of conflict between motivation and empowerment so it is because of the incorporation of all these standards and then having those standards followed by all the people within the organization you make sure that your standards are executed in the best possible way another example of the people and the process could be that of an airline which is communicating with the target audience about different kinds of foods which the airline is willing to serve to its passengers in light of their wearing social cultural backgrounds so if an airline in other words is willing to show that kind of flexibility in offering different formats of meals so to say then it has to have good people who are in a position to put all that into place and then deliver the promise the way it was made and if the passengers really trust this airline and start buying the tickets that testifies the positioning of that particular airline it also takes care of the problem of the expression and if the airline is expressing its position from this particular point of view then the expression becomes easy because this could be one of the ways of the outward expressions of the inner core of the service that you sell and if the airline thinks that this really could be the point of positioning if it really could be then it really can start communicating that point and through the people it can prove that it has just about the right quality of people who can deliver that promise not only that again this airline also seems to be having the right process in place which really enables the people within the company to execute what is demanded of them it is a big challenge but nevertheless it is being met by not one airline but many of them so the airline in other words is able to do that because of having a process which is backed by or which may be backed by the latest technological advances the meaning information technology the reason I'm talking about this because this is something which in present days for that has become the backbone of sophisticated processes that form the foundation of the so many businesses not only the service selling but also tangible to the product selling and I would well like to draw your attention toward the area of direct marketing and direct communication with the help of internet what this airline really is in a position to do is that it can not only to build up a beautiful data bank but also keep on improving it with the passage of time in relation to the more and more passengers that travel this airline and again in relation to their diverse social cultural backgrounds isn't it a beauty that the US part of that particular airline know that you have passengers could be logging to this particular part of the region and that particular part of the region and this is how you should be planning your strategies in terms of servicing food while having passengers on board it is a great advantage to which the airline can have to itself so it is the information which basically forms the process which highlights the strength of the airline it has to itself or to the brand it is selling getting back to the courier service let me now explain the third element the meaning the third peak which is what you call physical evidence just think about together this setup why is it that the largest courier service in our country has so many outlets that look so much uniformed and they all have the same manifestations in terms of their appearance in terms of their decor in terms of the uniforms of the people who are working for the company and so many other appearances it is because you really want to develop a very strong physical evidence of your appearance of your existence so this really is the importance of the physical evidence in other words if you are selling a service however beautiful and effective it may be but if you do not really have the support of the physical evidence then the selling is not going to be that much effective in other words because while you are selling that kind of a standardized service you've got to look into the branding process or the product development process just about in the same way as you look into the tangible products just like you like to create an identity of a tangible product by creating the one particular package by the same token you have to have the same appearance the while you're selling services that is why you have the same decor that is why you have the same colors the same symbols the symbols and imagery and the slogans could really take on added importance of the here because you've got to highlight to form a distance this is where you exist and this is the physical evidence that really support your service selling. Physical evidence also takes on the added importance in terms of restaurants let me take you back to the example of the fast food setup that started its venture with the help of direct delivery service and when you compare that with another restaurant which is also the end to direct delivery but direct delivery service of that particular restaurant is supported also by the physical evidence meaning by beautiful standardized the uniform kind of outlets then that restaurant stands for the better chances of being stronger in the marketplace so that really is a stronger and a more powerful brand. Here also the need to be very sensitive to the decor and the standardization of all the routines that takes on a lot of importance significance because of the reasons which you know by now another solution to the problems of service selling is that you've got to innovate all the time meaning you've got to innovate continuously the reason you have to continually improve your product because it is going to be copied by others very quickly so differentiation in other words is the name of the game if you keep on innovating you're doing that because you have kind of good people in place and those people are supported by a beautiful process or in other words they are part of the process that I just talked about so with the help of the people and the process you are in a position to continuously improving your product and the differentiating it from your competitors this really takes importance a lot of importance in terms of restaurants and also in terms of banks if you take the hard look at the financial products being sold by banks nowadays you will know what I'm talking about I mean just look at the credit cards and the different kinds of credits available to you the schemes offered by banks in terms of deposits and card loans and home financing and so on and so forth these are different examples of highly differentiated products which banks could have introduced in our market you can also have very highly differentiated products when it comes to insurance for example there is a different issue that the insurance sector in our country is not as the consumer centric as the banking is and the priority of that sector seems to be the big accounts in terms of the industry I mean the different industries and not retail the consumers the barring you know car insurance and the life insurance but the other areas of the scene to stake the kind of untapped I'm talking about this sector just for the sake of the giving you examples that they may clarify if you're thinking about the differentiation and the innovation so in other words what I'm talking about is that the service sellers could have got to have a good human resource to the meaning good people who are part of a good process and who really can give practical shape to the the concepts of differentiation and innovation to the service products and yet in other words I can say that the process of the branding in terms of the selling services has got to be the same just about the same as it is for tangible product brands the meaning you've got to come up with the right customer based model for your service brands let us not talk about the third solution to which we have the two of ourselves if we happen to be service sellers that is to improve distribution but just like in the case of the tangible product brands that you have to have a very good distribution system for selling your services because you would like to have an excellent outreach and I think that this can be explained with the help of the example of banks look at the number of branches which different banks could have all over the country the reason they have so many branches because they really want to create convenience for their customers to come and to make transactions at the points of their preference that is the point of sale but just like I talked about in relation to the tangible brands I mean tangible products so by the same token that you have to have a very effective a very intensive and at the same time to the very extensive outreach so what I'm talking about is that the more the areas covered by a bank the higher the number of transactions transactions or the higher the sales banks and today's market have become very customer-centric and I already have given you examples of the kinds of products they all are introducing and that is one indication and testimony rather toward the fact that they certainly develop customer based models to develop their brands and then leverage those through a process which is very similar to that of tangible product brands another solution to the problems that we're talking about is that you can make your brand tangible now how you can you really can make your brand tangible is through the physical evidence that I talked about so in other words this solution is in continuation of the concept of the physical evidence the only important thing is that you've got to standardize the looks and the appearances the manifestations with so much standardized and there's so much unique that the people really acknowledge your identity as a strong service seller just like in the case of the tangible product brands you try to sum up all the benefits that your service offers on to positioning meaning the outward expression of the inner core of the service that you're selling that has got to be expressed on the platform of positioning which basically is the fundamental relating the branding process and it all depends how you really would like to be the position the service that you are selling let us go back to the example of the airline get all over again and suppose that this airline is highlighting its position of hospitality now how is it that the airline really can get the sum up the benefits with the on positioning it could be through the picture of of a good-looking the air hostess with a smile that talks about the hospitality now it doesn't end there it of course starts there in a way that the communication process is kept off but what it really boils down to is the ability of the airline to offer the kind of hospitality it is talking about so if it is summing up the benefits that the way it is delivering those then the position is the well taken and the well occupied in the minds of your customers and you're successful and the branding your service the way that you are successful and the branding your tangible products if there's an airline that they may like to highlight its positioning on some other the platform for example the maintenance then the airline could have liked to talk in different terms I think that goes without saying and the positioning has got to come up accordingly the summing up of those benefits is going to take a very different shape in comparison with the hospitality that I've just talked about be mindful of that that's very important another solution that we have to ourselves as the service sellers is using of testimonials those services which really cannot be summed up on positioning have to have the support of the testimonials by celebrities or by those people who are important and who really means something to the target audience if you cannot really go for the kind of the campaign as I talked about in relation to the airline or if you cannot show an umbrella for example if you are selling insurance if you cannot show a bird's nest you know full of eggs with a mother bird sitting right on top of it protecting it then you've got to make use of the testimonials you have to have those people who really can talk about the benefits and they can talk in terms of the benefits that they have derived to get out of the service that they use sold them nothing gives credibility to service more than somebody important telling the target audience that that somebody is highly satisfied with the service that you are selling so it goes without saying that while you use testimonials the claim that you're making through the celebrity has got to be very consistent with the positioning and we are getting back to the same old concepts that we've been talking about all along the course and I don't really have to throw the more light on that so as long as you are very consistent with the positioning the testimonials are going to be useful and they're going to have their own utility so this is one of the ways that we solve our problems in relation to service selling another thing that we really can do is develop a very good relationship with all the customers that we have while we sell services we know that in most of the cases when we sell services because we create a data bank and then we maintain that data bank if you are a bank you have the name of each and every customer if you are an insurance company the same happens and if you are a courier service again the same situation so you you can well imagine the kind of benefit that you have in comparison with selling those products that you sell through so many intermediaries and while going through the layers of intermediaries it is very hard for you to keep track of the final consumers but in the case of services not having any channels in between what happens is because you are in a beautiful position to maintain a data bank and you really can improve that data bank with all the transactions that take place and in case you know those transactions could stop taking place because you can get back to those customers asking them questions because why is it that they're not coming back to you so this is the benefit and this is the way that you develop a relationship so whether the customer is coming back and back again or is not coming back the you certainly have an opportunity of the maintaining that relationship and the opportunity of communicating with your target audience and loyal customers and dissatisfied customers at the same time whenever you think it is important to do so so what is imperative here is that customers have got to be cultivated and a continuous touch with them is of very high significance when that happens whether what you can do is because you can communicate to get all the new developments that are taking place again you see because if you're a bank you can talk about the new product that you have introduced if you are an insurance company or a courier service or any entity of that nature you really can talk about the development of the new product that you are going to create or the innovation that that has taken place in relation to an existing product you also are in a beautiful position to go for the brand dynamics and by brand dynamics what I really mean is the measuring your brand's performance I think it goes without saying that you have a ready made data bank which is going to allow you to pick those respondents you think really can be contacted with relative ease and then you can ask questions on so many different strategic variables of measurement you can talk about customer loyalty you can talk about pricing that you can talk about the positioning and so on and so forth I mean all those the variables which you think are very important in the context of the services that you are selling and that also becomes part of the brand plan which I'm going to talk about in the next lecture another thing which you really can achieve with the help of developing a continuous relationship with your customers is the loyalty factor we keep discussing loyalty from so many different angles but here you seek it in terms of solving the service selling problem we really are in a better position to maintain a continuous contact with our customers and therefore we are in a better position to make those customers more consistent by providing a good service and consistent customers are going to be loyal customers another thing which I really want to talk about is that you have to industrialize the service now this is the last factor but this is one of the most important factors and the example of this factor I would like to give you with the help of you know any fast food restaurant to which you think is your favorite all the fast food restaurants in our country are the big chains and the way you know they prepared their food and the way they sell that is known to all of us they really have industrialized these service to the by making routines and procedures that are so much standardized that it is it has become kind of an industrialized process so the what it really boils down to is that the process that you are going to create or you have created for the for your service has to be so much standardized that it should look and it should have the essence of an industrialized concept make sure that all the variables of these standard procedures do create and achieve a balance between motivation and empowerment that is very important and if you really can achieve that you are managing your service brand beautifully the last factor is the education of these staff members unless communication takes place to the effect of educating your people about the delivery of the service meaning the way it is going to be delivered and the essence of that delivery that is just about no way that those people are going to be very effective while delivering that service so in other words the people within the company have got to have a complete desire and an intention a passionate involvement in delivering the service that you are selling and when you have those ingredients your service brand is going to make its mark just like your tangible product brand does so this is all about the service of the brands I really wanted to talk about and before time really runs out let me give you a very brief recap it is not different from tangible product brands the branding and services is very similar in terms of the process that we undertake and the process is the same the meaning of the brand's vision then the brand's promise then the brand's positioning brand's channels and the brand's communication and so on and so forth all the steps and phases that you make use of the while building your tangible brands are made use of the while you are working with your service brands so in other words as a summary the service brands could have have got to be taken into the same light and that is the light of being customer centric that is the lesson of today's lecture and with this I say thank you and Allah Hafiz I look forward to talking with you in the next lecture