OVERVIEW

MKTG207 has been designed to provide you with an introduction to the field of services marketing. This unit has been designed to build upon the knowledge and skills you acquired from studying introduction to marketing We are all consumers of services. We use services daily when we study at university, do our banking, visit our favourite café/restaurant, go the doctor, get our hair cut, use our phone, and go to the shops for some retail therapy. Despite this commonality, we know that as consumers of services, we are different from one another. We buy different brands, visit different banks, prefer different restaurants, and wear different clothes.  Our evaluations of each service encounter are unique and change on every purchase occasion as we are influenced by our own prior experiences, our perceptions, as well as the people, and information that surrounds us. With this state of flux, how can we construct coherent marketing strategies to target consumers in the service sector effectively?

In this class we will try to learn how and why service consumers behave the way that they do. We will study theories from marketing and psychology and to attempt to use these theories to predict how consumers will respond to different service marketing activities. We will learn how and why the marketing of services is different to selling physical goods. How important it is to create strong, and enduring relationships with service customers. How challenging it is to manage what is effectively an ephemeral, “happening” experience (ie. A service) and how the effective delivery of a service starts within the organisation (ie. With its employees and organisational culture). You will have the opportunity to apply this theory through the analysis of a variety of real-world examples directed at amplifying your understanding of how services marketing concepts are used.

This is a 3 credit point unit.

Details of Assessment

Assessed Coursework 10%

Random collection x2 typed two page responses worth 10% in total (worth 5% each) due between week 2-11

Each week you are required to type a maximum 2 page response to the set question for that week PRIOR to your tutorial. The schedule for this, and the set topic questions are outlined in the "Unit Schedule" and are titled "Assessments due for discussion" each week. These responses must be brought to class. Your tutor will RANDOMLY collect two (2) of these responses for marking throughout the semester. These are worth 5% each. You will not receive prior notice of a collection. You must therefore ensure that you write your responses each week, and bring them to class.

You are required to read each of the set case studies, or journal articles in the teaching schedule. Your analysis should be supported throughout with the services marketing theory you are being asked to discuss. You must source one additional journal article (in addition to any SET journal readings) which relates to the topic discussed in the set reading and incorporate this into your solution. You must correctly reference the article both in-text as an in-text citation using the Harvard author date method, as well as at the end of your solution by including a full reference to the article.

• You are required to answer each set question in paragraph form.
• Referencing is required.
• Weekly responses are to be formatted as follows; two single A4 page (strict page limit but EXCLUDES references), size 12 times new roman font, 1.5 line spacing, normal margins, registered student name, and student ID number printed at top of page along with topic title of submission.
• Typed responses are to be collected in class by your tutor in hard copy. Submissions are due to your tutor in hard copy only and strictly within the FIRST 10 minutes of class.
• No extensions will be granted.  Students who have not submitted the task prior to the deadline will be awarded a mark of 0 for the task, except for cases in which an application for disruption of studies is made and approved.
• Electronic submissions will not be accepted.
• Non-inclusion of the extra journal article (that you source) will lead to a 20% penalty applied to the final grade.
• Please bring a duplicate copy of your solution to class in preparation for class discussion and presentation. You will be randomly called on by the tutor to present your responses during the class.

The set questions are outlined in the presentation schedule contained in the UNIT SCHEDULE in this outline where the tasks are listed by week.

Participation 10% - between week 2-11 inclusive

Discussion of the weekly written 2 page solutions in class attracts 1% per tutorial for a total of 10 tutorials to a maximum of 10%. Students will be asked to physically show this work to the tutor at the start of the class as evidence of completion. This will form a part of the participation mark in addition to verbal discussion during class. In class you are required to verbally participate in class discussions by offering a substantive contribution. Your class participation grade will be composed of the quantity and quality of your verbal participation in class in response to the weekly assessed coursework topics and any other material discussed in tutorials. Each week you will receive a score of 1% or 0% between weeks 2 and 11 inclusive.

Attending classes will substantially increase your understanding of the assigned readings and provide you with insight into issues beyond those covered in the readings. It will also give you the opportunity to actively participate in class discussions and obtain a better class participation grade. Note, however, that your mere presence is not sufficient to earn points for class participation. The quantity and, especially, the quality of your contributions to class discussions are also essential.

NB. No extensions will be granted.  Students who have not submitted the task prior to the deadline will be awarded a mark of 0 for the task, except for cases in which an application for disruption of studies is made and approved.

NB: Knowledge of the content in the set questions and knowledge gained from the class discussions will reflected in the final exam.

Investigative essay 40%

Students are required to complete an individual essay during the course.

The essay topic is as follows:

Are consumer-brand relationships always positive and value-creating? Can consumer engagement lead to negative and/or harmful effects for the brand and its consumers? Discuss.

As a starter tip please read http://bbr2015.brandrelationships.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2015/04/Fournier-Alvarez_JCP2013_Relating-Badly-to-Brands.pdf

This is an essay based on scholarly journal article research, theory and critical evaluation/synthesis (not mere description). You must support your answer with a minimum of 6 journal articles (can be peer reviewed or otherwise but must be from sources classified as Journals). The essays upper word limit is 2,500 words. There is no minimum word limit. The upper word limit is strict. NB. The word limit does not include; title page/cover page, sub-headings, reference list (it does include in-text citations), appendix.

Notes:

• A minimum of 6 journal articles. Penalty of 20/100 marks applied if this criteria is not met.
• Full Harvard author-date referencing is required (in-text citations, and reference list).
• Brand examples may be discussed, but only if they are cited within the content of the journal articles that have been selected for use. Personal and subjective examples may not be used.

• Exceeding the word limit will lead to a deduction of 10/100 marks.

No extensions will be granted. There will be a deduction of 10% of the total available marks made from the total awarded mark for each 24 hour period or part thereof that the submission is late (for example, 25 hours late in submission – 20% penalty). This penalty does not apply for cases in which an application for disruption of studies is made and approved. No submission will be accepted after solutions have been posted..Your essay must be submitted online VIA iLearn and Turnitin for MKTG207:

Submit softcopy to the plagiarism detection system ‘Turnitin’ VIA iLearn before the deadline on monday at the start of week 11 by 11:00pm

Please make sure that you are submitting to the correct dropbox.

Please note the following:

• Your soft copy must include a title Page with full official student name (last name in CAPITALS), student ID number, tutors name, tutorial day, tutorial time and tutorial room number. It must also include your reference list. Please name your file as follows: Surname_Tutor_Final Essay.doc
• Essay should be formatted as follows; size 12 times new roman font, 1.5 line spacing, regular margins, headings in capitals and bold, sub-headings in upper and lower case and bold italics.
• Essays will be marked electronically via GradeMark on Turnitin using iLearn, annotated with comments from the marker and your grades will be available for viewing on the Grades link via iLearn approximately 2-3 weeks after submission. An announcement will be made on iLearn when assignments have been marked.

Final Examination

This 3 hour examination is worth 40% of your course assessment.

The weighting of your final exam is as follows:

You are expected to clearly demonstrate knowledge from the following sources in your final exam;

• All Chapters from the textbook outlined in the Learning activities schedule,
• The material discussed during lectures
• The material discussed during tutorials including the set weekly readings
• A general knowledge of the material discussed in your individual essay.
• The exam will be aligned with the content discussed in your lectures and your tutorials. Your weekly tutorial class discussions will be of benefit in preparing for the exam.

Required Textbook

The textbook to accompany this unit is:

Lovelock, C. H., Patterson, P.G. and Walker, R.H., Services Marketing: An Asia-Pacific and Australian Perspective (6th Edition), Sydney: Pearson Education Australia, 2014.

Copies of older editions are available in library in the reserve section.

Please note that old editions of this text do exist. You are welcome to use these, however you will need to cross-check the content of older versions with the 6^th edition of the text on a weekly basis to ensure that you are reading the correct material. Cases in the old versions are different.

Writing Skills

The major assessment for this unit revolves around writing an essay. This essay allows students to develop their research and writing skills.

With regard to the development of writing skills students are advised to read the following resource copies of which will be made available in class. These are also available in the library.

Burton, L. 2010. An Interactive Approach to Writing Essays and Research Reports in Psychology, John Wiley & Sons, Australia

This source also covers information on topics such as; writing style, critical thinking, essay writing, referencing, structure, and plagiarism.

Researching Skills - Journals

In addition to the required textbook for this Unit, you should familiarise yourself with the relevant periodical section of the library. Journals recommended for your study in marketing include:

• Journal of Marketing
• Journal of Consumer Research
• International Journal of Research in Marketing
• Harvard Business Review
• Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science
• Journal of Services Research
• Journal of Services Marketing

You can access these resources through the Library home page. Under ‘research’ select search for ‘journals’ and type the name of the journal.

Recommended Research Databases

You should also familiarize yourself with key research databases available for access through the library. Databases recommended for your study in marketing include:

• Ebscohost:
  • Academic Search Elite
  • Business Source Premier
• Wiley Interscience
• Passport (Industry Reports)
• Google Scholar (only when logged in via the Macquarie University website)

Your Lecturer is available for consultation ThursdAy 9-11am on arrangement. Your tutors are also available. Please email to arrange if necessary.

The timetable for classes can be found on the University web site at: https://timetables.mq.edu.au.

Technology used and required

• This unit requires access to standard information and communication technologies such as a personal computer and internet access.
• Students are required to familiarise themselves with iLearn (https://ilearn.mq.edu.au/login/MQ/). iLearn will be used to post course material, announcements, student grades and as a means of communication between staff members and students.
• Students are expected to check their university email account and contact the teaching staff through it. 
• All important announcements will be made on iLearn and you are expected to view the announcements page of the course website at least once per week

NA

ESSAY WRITING SKILLS

Writing the Introduction

The introduction outlines the topic that you are going to address, states the purpose of the essay and outlines the main points you will argue. It is typically only a few paragraphs long and is designed to capture the readers interest and attention. Tips on writing an introduction are provided next:

• Keep it short – one or two paragraphs
• It sets the framework
• It is a roadmap for the reader – it tells them what you are reviewing, why you are reviewing it and how you intend to proceed with your arguments
• Ensure that you do not use first person language i.e. “i will argue...”. You should only use third person language “Research evidence indicates that” or “In this essay it will be argued that...”
• Your argument should be based on the research evidence that you have read and not on your personal opinion

Organising the Information to Start Writing

Now that you have an outline of what it is that you need to write about and how you will structure your report, you now need to start the writing process. Organising your information throughout is essential. Some tips are provided next:

• Keep similar points or concepts close together. You may use one paragraph or a few paragraphs to explain related ideas
• Only present one broad concept per paragraph and try not to introduce many new ideas into that paragraph.
• Once you have finished discussing related concepts use a linking paragraph to move to the next concept.
• Ensure that your paragraphs build logically upon each other.

Paraphrasing

Why is referencing important? Referencing is important for two main reasons. Firstly it allows you to acknowledge the source of the information that you have included in your work. Whenever you use someone else’s ideas in your report, you must in-text cite their work. Secondly, in-text citations within your report allow the reader to identify the original source of the idea.

Referencing therefore ensures that you do not commit plagiarism. Plagiarism is the copying of other authors ideas and passing them off as your own. It Is something to be avoided as it is equivalent to cheating. Plagiarism will lead to a grade of zero. We use Turnitin to assist us in the process of identifying plagiarism.

In order to avoid plagiarism you need to undertake paraphrasing. This means rewriting the original idea in your own words to explain the idea. Think about the following example. The original sentence taken from Bowden (2010) said:  

"Similar to satisfaction, delight may also be influenced by the customer’s anticipatory expectations. That is, in highly hedonic service contexts where customers have high anticipatory expectations shaped by strong brand equity and strong word of mouth recommendation, the customer may expect to be delighted."

It is not appropriate to simply change a few words in every sentence and then place an in-text citation at the end of the sentence. You would be guilty of plagiarising if you wrote:

In highly hedonic service contexts here there is strong brand equity and strong word of mouth recommendation, delight, like satisfaction can be influenced by the customer’s anticipatory expectations (Bowden, 2010).

In order to avoid plagiarism you need to put the ideas into your own words and cite the original author of the idea:

Bowden (2010) found that the nature of the service context strongly influenced customer’s expectations of the service delivered. Where customers’ a priori expectations were considered to be high and where brand equity played a significant role in shaping these expectations, customers expected to feel delighted by the service.

Practice your paraphrasing skills with the following pointers:

• Read an original paragraph from one of your journal articles
• Take notes on the key points made
• Now express these points in your own words
• Compare your rewritten paragraph to the original authors – check that the meaning is retained, but ensure that the way you have expressed your paragraph is sufficiently different
• Acknowledge the author of the idea in your rewritten version by indicating the authors surname and the year of the articles publication

In-Text Citations

An in-text citation is an acknowledgement of the sources that you have used in your report. In an in-text citation you write the authors surname and the year that the article was published in. We use the Harvard author-date convention of referencing and in text citations. This is a specific style as illustrated below.

The citation can be placed at the start of a sentence, or at the end of a sentence where you have used another author’s ideas.

At the end of a sentence the in-text citation is placed in parentheses and is separated by a comma:

The study concluded that delight was not an important determinant of customer loyalty (Bowden, 2010).

At the start of a sentence, the author’s name becomes a part of the sentence itself:

Bowden (2010) found that delight was not an important determinant of customer loyalty.

If there are three or more author’s of the article you have read you simply cite the first authors name and then add the words et al. This is a latin abbreviation for “and others.” A full stop must be included after the “al.”.An example of this is as follows:

The study concluded that delight was not an important determinant of customer loyalty (Bowden et al. 2010).

Quotations are a special case of citation. Quotations used in essays should be short and limited to one or two sentences in length. It is advisable to limit the number of quotations that you use to around 5 per essay. Quotations should be placed inside quotation marks and cited using the authors name, year of publication and the page from which the quotation came from.

“Delight may be influenced by the customer’s anticipatory expectations. That is, in highly hedonic service contexts where customers have high anticipatory expectations shaped by strong brand equity and strong word of mouth recommendation, the customer may expect to be delighted” (Bowden, 2010, p. 13).

You should always try to read original sources rather than relying on the summaries that other authors have provided you with. However sometimes you may need to include a secondary source in your in text referencing. Citing a secondary source requires you to acknowledge two sets of authors – that is, the authors of the article you are reading (primary source) and the original source which you have not read (secondary source). For example:   

Delight is defined as a distinct and separate evaluative response to the satisfaction response (Oliver et al. 1997 cited in Bowden, 2010).

In the reference list (to be discussed next) you would only include the article that you have actually read. So using the above example you would only include Bowden, 2010.

Concluding

The conclusion summarises your main points. You should not introduce any new material in the conclusion that have not already been discussed. In the conclusion you describe the answers to the research topic that was set.

The information above was adapted from the following text which is in the reserve section of the library and which is also available for purchase from the Co-op Bookshop on campus: Burton, L. 2010. An Interactive Approach to Writing Essays and Research Reports in Psychology, John Wiley & Sons, Australia

Reference List – Journal articles & Books

A reference list provides the reader of your essay with full publication details of all of the sources that you have used in your essay. Like the in text citations, a reference list allows the reader to identify where you have obtained your information from and to retrieve it if necessary. A reference list only includes those sources you have actually cited in-text. It does not include sources you have simply read but have not used in your essay. Reference lists should be compiled in alphabetical order.

Journal articles are your primary source of material for this essay task. A journal article reference includes the following, author’s surname, first name initial, year of publication, title of publication, journal title from which the publication came, volume of journal, issue number of journal and page references for the article. An example is provided next:    

Bowden, J., 2009. Customer Engagement: A Framework for Assessing Customer-Brand Relationships. The Case of the Restaurant Industry. Journal of Hospitality Marketing & Management, 18 (6), 574-596.

It is important that each of these elements in the reference are presented exactly as above. This includes ensuring that the journal title is in italics; that a full stop and a comma follows the authors initial; that a full stop follows the title of the article; that the issue number is in brackets etc.

You may wish to use the referencing convention for Harvard Author-Date as presented in the above. This style is based on that of McMillan, K. and Weyers, J., 2010. How to Write Essays & Assignments, United Kingdom: Pearson Education.

ALTERNATIVELY you may wish to refer to the Macquarie University Referencing resource website (Monash University, University of Queensland, University of Leeds, University of Western Cape):

http://www.library.mq.edu.au/research/referencing.html

For further information on referencing and essay writing it is highly recommended that you obtain a copy of one of the following texts from the reserve section of the library or from the Co-Op Bookshop.

Burton, L. 2010. An Interactive Approach to Writing Essays and Research Reports in Psychology, John Wiley & Sons, Australia

McMillan, K. and Weyers, J., 2010. How to Write Essays & Assignments, United Kingdom: Pearson Education.

This unit draws its case studies and brand examples from an international context. Sustainability is discussed within the context of not for profit firms and their brand positioning.  

MKTG207 builds on material introduced in previous marketing units. In doing so, the unit has a dual focus. The first objective is to develop students' skills in using theoretical research in marketing to develop a sound knowledge of the complexities of services marketing consumer behaviour. The second objective is to introduce students to the practice of services marketing and familiarise them with marketing strategies which are designed to more effectively target consumers.