Importance of services in industrial marketing

Abstract

Though industrial marketing has been emerging as a distinctive area since the late eighties, there is very little literature on the importance of services in industrial marketing. In the liberalised Indian marketing scenario, there is a lot of scope for value addition in industrial marketing if services (both pre-sale and after-sale) are used as a marketing tool. The first part of the paper deals with certain selective but vital aspects related to services in industrial markets. These aspects are obtained from selected articles and studies. The second part brings out the author's opinion on the importance of services in establishing credibility in industrial markets. The third part deals with several dimensions of pre-sale services as visualised by the author. A survey of literature on services (related to industrial marketing) shows that pre-sales service is an area which has not been explored very much. The objective of the article is to highlight the usefulness of services as a competitive tool in industrial marketing.