Service Marketing Issues in Emerging Economies: Brand Equity of Domestic Service Brands

The emerging economy globally has a wide arena of untapped markets with enormous growth opportunities that are being explored by the services industry presently. However, as service marketing is different from product marketing it leaves a “Pandora’s box” of challenges because in service sector industries the “product” is intangible and the offering and utilization are largely inseparable. Brand equity of domestic companies in the services industry plays a very crucial role in positing the brand in the market where the competition with foreign brands is quite high. This chapter focuses primarily on the challenges such as lack of brand awareness, brand loyalty, brand association, perceived quality by the customer of the domestic brands, and other proprietary brand assets faced by the domestic services brands in the countries that lie in the bottom of the economic pyramid. This chapter also helps in defining a scope to mitigate the challenges specifically focusing on the domestic market of the developing economic countries.