Service Industries Marketing

New Approaches

Mark Gabbott, Gillian Hogg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135228972
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Commerce Général

This book covers a wide spectrum of topics, service contexts and methodologies and reflects the broad range of current services research. Its aim is to provide an eclectic overview of services marketing by including papers that demonstrate the breadth and depth of research in this area, and it reflects the international scope and the strength of the discipline as we enter the new millennium.

Communicative Staging of the Wilderness Servicescape

Eric J. Arnould, Linda L. Price and Patrick Tierney

Servicescapes are commercial places. That is, they are sites for commercial exchanges. Servicescapes are more or less consciously designed places, calculated to produce commercially significant actions. Like other places, servicescapes represent a subset of social rules, conventions and expectations in force in a given behavioural setting, serving to define the nature and scope of personal experiences and social interactions [1992: 61]. And like places generally, they have meanings and values for persons, indeed may serve as the foci for the production of socially and personally significant meanings, intentions and purposes [Tilly, 1994; Sherry, 1997]. Thus, servicescapes may sometimes transcend their commercial intent, making manifest a range of non-commercial social and personal potentialities of action and outcome. In this category, for example, falls Tokyo Disneyland, a servicescape that not only entertains but informs Japanese perceptions of Japanese culture and values in a multicultural, global arena [Brannen, 1992].

We can think of servicescapes as nested products of managerial strategies and customer inputs. Servicescapes are produced through substantive and communicative staging, and can have high or low levels of substantive staging combined with either high or low levels of communicative staging [Cohen, 1988, 1989; MacCannell, 1973]. Substantive staging refers to the physical creation of contrived environments. Even servicescapes that emphasize authenticity, ranging from zoological flight cages and safari parks to Universal Studios, ‘Earthquake’ or ‘Backdraft’ attractions are, after all, contrived. Communicative staging refers to ways in which the environment is presented and interpreted. Communicative staging involves the transmission of servicescape meanings, both those directly related to service delivery and those transcending the instrumental context. Communicative staging moves servicescape meanings from service provider to customer, between customers, and potentially at least, from customers to providers [Cohen, 1989]. Communicative staging is patterned through the who, what, how, and when of communication. It requires the active participation both of service providers and clients, and to a considerable extent relies for its effectiveness on a mutuality of cultural understanding.

Servicescapes typically use at least some substantive staging, and may combine that with either high or low levels of communicative staging. For example, a restaurant serving French cuisine may decorate in a manner redolent of Provencal life; this is substantive staging. It may also print the menu in French and hire French-speaking wait-staff, and feature a singer of Edith Piaf songs. This is communicative staging.

Previous research has stressed substantive staging of the servicescape over communicative staging. Yet, we argue, servicescapes can be dramatically affected by communicative staging [Neumann, 1991; Percy, 1989]. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the role of communicative staging in servicescape production. In order to better understand how communicative staging might be used as a managerial tool, we sought to investigate a servicescape that of necessity is positioned on low levels of substantive staging to see whether and what type of communicative staging is employed.

This study investigates a predominantly natural (low substantive staging) rather than built servicescape, making detailed accounts of environmental dimensions and the actual behaviours of the occupants. Our goal is to provide a ‘thick description’ [Geertz, 1973] of the specific nature of commercial activity and social interaction that takes place in this servicescape. This thick description moves beyond conventional analyses of customer expectations, satisfactions, quality judgements, and the factors that influence variables in a leisure service setting [e.g., Amould and Price, 1993; Wakefield and Blodgett, 1994] to the broader cultural meanings and values such settings may evoke.

The natural servicescape we selected to study contrasts with most examined in previous research, thus providing a unique location for investigation of the boundaries of current servicescape theory [Dubin, 1976]. In particular, this project provides a broadened conceptual framework of servicescapes as produced through the dramatic staging of cultural scripts [Deighton, 1992; Suprenant and Solomon, 1987]. For Bitner, ‘the man-made, physical surroundings as opposed to the natural or social environment … is referred to … as the “servicescape”’ [Bitner, 1992: 58]. By contrast, the servicescape examined here lies in the Yampa and Green river canyons that flow through Dinosaur National Monument (hereafter DNM) on the Colorado-Utah border. DNM is managed by the US National Park Service and provides business opportunities for half a dozen commercial, white water river rafting operations. We deemed the DNM an appropriate site for study since it headquarters many of the outfitters that run white water commercially in the Western states, and it attracts a large number of customers each season.

At the outset we can enumerate some critical empirical contrasts between our focal servicescape and others conventionally discussed in the marketing literature. Foremost among these differences is that this servicescape is predominantly natural rather than built. In addition, unlike most that have been discussed previously, it matches most closely what Bitner calls complex, elaborate servicescapes [but see Hutton and Richardson, 1995]. Even within the category of complex, elaborate servicescapes, this servicescape is unique in several respects likely to co-vary with its natural rather than built condition: limited managerial control is exercised over the substantive staging of the site; preservation of the site is privileged over customer needs and wants rather than subservient to customer needs and wants; it is in the foreground rather than the background of service delivery, and both service provider and customer access the servicescape from the outside together, rather than the customer entering an environment under the provider’s control.

The data are drawn from a multi-year, multi-method investigation of service delivery in white water river rafting contexts [Amould and Price, 1993; Price, Amould and Tierney, 1995]. Three seasons of data collection inform our analyses. Data reported here disproportionately represent insights drawn from 18 in-depth interviews with river guides, ten days of participant observation conducted on two five-day rafting trips, and over 50 post-trip surveys of rafting customers collected after their return home. All of this data was collected during the summer of 1995 with an expressed purpose of better understanding the wilderness servicescape. Consistent with proposals for the application of ethnographic methods in marketing [Amould and Wallendorf, 1994], all data has been subject to computer-aided analysis to probe it systematically for themes and connections.

In the first part of the paper, we consider the commercial mediation of the wilderness servicescape. Our data reveal that the primary instrument for producing the wilderness servicescape is communicative staging – the way in which the environment is presented and interpreted [Cohen, 1989]. River guides are sometimes aware of the communicative staging they engage in, but the staging is far from entirely strategic or fully systematized. In addition, as previous research has shown, both service providers and clients assume a role in providing narrative framing for the service experience [Harris, Baron and Ratcliffe, 1995]. Our data show that what is communicated and when it is communicated is patterned rather than random, and is keyed to physical movement through a carefully selected servicescape. The experience evinces a narrative quality.

The second part of the paper develops four conventionalised American Wilderness themes that serve for guides and customers alike as a framework for interpreting the significance of the wilderness servicescape. Consistent with previous research linking the effective performance of services with the evocation of culturally pertinent narrative themes, what Deighton calls show performances [1992], we illustrate how the cultural construal of the American wilderness servicescape informs both river guides’ and customers’ rafting experiences [Varley and Crowther, 1996]. The themes evidenced in this wilderness servicescape yield new insights for servicescape design, interpretation and management.

In the discussion section of the paper we illustrate how our results might provide insights for the production of other built service environments. In addition, we outline some aspects of servicescapes that merit further investigation.

The Commercial Delivery of Wilderness

Wilderness experiences are mediated increasingly by specialised businesses. This commercial packaging and offering of wilderness is always coloured with fundamental irony. For, as Tuan says, ‘at the back of the romantic appreciation of nature, is the privilege and wealth of the city’ [1974: 103]. At the same time that wilderness visitors seek and escape from civilization, they are framed ‘within and against the civilization they sought to leave behind.’

Wilderness businesses range from skill-building schools to packagers of e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• The Advertising of Services: Consumer Views v. Normative Guidelines
• The Buying Centre: Patterns of Structure and Interaction in Primary Health Care
• Segmenting Financial Services Markets for Customer Relationships: A Portfolio-Based Approach
• Relationship Marketing in Corporate Legal Services
• Contextualising: Technology, Relationships and Time in a Financial Services Virtual Organisation
• Communicative Staging of the Wilderness Servicescape
• Assessing the Theatrical Components of the Service Encounter: A Cluster Analysis Examination
• Parental Choice of Primary School: An Application of Q-Methodology
• The Use of Mystery Shopping in the Measurement of Service Delivery
• Abstracts
• Notes on Contributors
• Index