Gartner Research

The Seven Deadly Sins of Service Marketing

Published: 23 October 2000

ID: G0093098

Analyst(s): Laura McLellan

Summary

Every service provider has its favorite tale of money spent unnecessarily, of feeding services management egos at the expense of needed marketing, and of service launches or sales programs that failed. Gartner Dataquest presents the first in a series of "hall of shame" documents: the seven most common pitfalls in IT services marketing. This Perspective covers the symptoms of each worst practice, causes and potential remedies.

Table Of Contents
  • Introduction
  • The Seven Deadly Sins
    • No. 1: Confusing Product vs. Services Marketing Techniques
    • No. 2: Planning Without Relevant Profiling and Segmentation
    • No. 3: Creating Stories and Messages That Are not Differentiated
    • No. 4: Commoditizing a Service too Early Through Packaging Like a Product
    • No. 5: Looking Backward at the Competition vs. Forward to New Market Opportunities
    • No. 6: Thinking That Marketing Communications is Marketing
    • No. 7: Treating Branding as Advertising and Logo Art, Not as a Way of Doing Business
  • Dataquest Perspective

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