Traditional Services Marketing Issues—Analysis of Impact of Technology in Developed and Emerging Markets

This chapter investigates the issues with services marketing in the current world, and the role of technology in overcoming those challenges. The chapter also describes how technology is helping companies from developed nations, and creating competitive advantage over companies based out of emerging markets. We start by looking at how technology has helped change the world of services marketing and its impact on the overall marketing activities and processes. We begin by examining two major technologies—Internet and Mobile, and its impact on various industries. A deep dive in some of the unique and exciting industry use cases that has evolved over the past decade. Each of the technical elements has been discussed in detail, with specific use cases to help users understand the impact of the technology landscape. In the next section, there is a detailed discussion about how technology has helped overcome some of the challenges of services marketing and created new business models and service delivery options. A few new businesses has been explained to give the readers more in-depth insight. The next section is about the situation in the emerging markets and how lot of the service marketing issues are still prevalent due to the lack of technology. The discussion highlights the big divide which technology is creating between the way services are delivered in developed markets versus emerging markets. The impact on business as well as social life has also been discussed. This is followed by a conclusion section.