The Evolution of Services Advertising in a Services-Driven National Economy

ABSTRACT

With services continuing to dominate the gross domestic product, the marketing and advertising of services remain a core issue in the discipline. Because of their generally intangible nature, however, services often face unique challenges in developing effective and appropriate advertising strategies. Given the importance of promotional decisions to service practitioners, an assessment of the current literature guiding services-advertising decisions is important. In 1997, Carolyn Tripp published an overview of the services-advertising literature covering a 15-year period corresponding to services-marketing's emergence and early development. Her overall conclusion was that the services-advertising literature lagged behind the services-marketing field in general. As a result, she proposed several specific areas that needed attention and suggestions for enhancing the quality of research on services advertising. In this paper, we provide an update to this research by identifying, classifying, and analyzing articles on services advertising that have been published since 1997. Although a number of services-advertising articles seem to have heeded Tripp's various concerns, there is still much to be done on the topic. Hence, we provide additional direction for needed areas of research in the area of services advertising.