ces (facilitating and value-augmenting services) and postsale services (customer service departments, repair and maintenance services). (Kotler, 2004, p. 406)
Undoubtedly, one of the hazards of close study of marketing as an academic discipline or of engaging in marketing activities as a practitioner must be that such statements as these seem very much to be self-evident, almost so obviously commonsense and practical in their articulation as to be no-brainers. And yet--how many products have been "oversold" by aggressive presale pitches that tout value and/or ease of use? Motion-picture advertising that promises the customers the movie is the best one ever made, computer-software advertising that promises a program is a "killer app," fast-food surf-n-turf that promises to be the best food anybody ever ate--the list could go on all day. The trouble is, it will be a rare movie exhibitor who gives a patron a refund on an awful movie, many software companies cannot seem to do enough to limit their liability for inferior or poorly performing product, and it is not as if Sizzler promised the shrimp would not be six months frozen or criminally overcooked. Meanwhile, there are the routine offenses against human civility that occur because service is not part of a sale--rude or incompetent retail clerks, customer-service departments that are opaque to computer error until a customer spends hours documenting the mistakes, and so on.
Yet there is a body of research showing that service is one of the key indices of the character that a relationship between a customer and a product or company assumes. The relationship status, in turn, "play[s] an important role in how consumers respond to marketing communications," with a sense of trust being "perhaps the most important element of a successful marketer-consumer relationship" (Stewart, Pavlou, & Ward, 2002, p. 361). Historically, traditional modes of advertising have been considered to have lim...