The impact of development on new financial service success

Explores the impact of a number of aspects of the new product development project on the success of new financial services in the United Kingdom. Finds that synergy between the new product and the organization, and the quality of internal marketing, are particularly associated with eventual success for the new product. Technological advantage, market research and responsiveness (i.e. speed of development) are also associated with success. Banks seem to be particularly effective in their use of market research, whereas building societies are good at internal marketing and synergy. New interest accounts have been particularly successful because of the use of market research and the speed of their development

The augmented service offering: a conceptualisation and study of its impact on new service success

Unlike companies that produce tangible goods, service firms typically cannot rely on product advantage as a means for ensuring the success of a new service. Developing a competitive response to a tangible product may require significant investments of time and effort. In many cases, however, competitors can easily duplicate the core elements of a firm's new service. This fundamental difference between new products and new services means that managers who hope to find the keys to new-service success must look to factors other than sustainable product advantage. Chris Storey and Christopher Easingwood suggest that managers must understand the totality of the service offering from the customer's perspective. They explain that the purchase of a service is influenced not only by the service itself, but also by such factors as the service firm's reputation and the quality of the customer's interaction with the firm's systems and staff—in other words, by the augmented service offering (ASO). Using the results of a study they conducted in the consumer financial services industry in the U.K., they identify the components of the ASO, and they examine the relative contributions of these components to the success of new services. In their model, the ASO comprises three elements: the service product, service augmentation, and marketing support. The core of the ASO—the service product—includes such dimensions as product quality, product distinctiveness, and perceived risk. The study's results suggest that improvements in the service product open up new opportunities for the firm, but have only modest effects on sales and profitability. Rounding out the ASO model are service augmentation and marketing support. Service augmentation encompasses such dimensions as distribution strength, staff-customer interactions, and reputation. The customer recognizes and responds to these elements of the ASO, but they are not part of the product core. Marketing support involves those marketing and management actions that affect the quality of the product and its augmentation, even though customers typically are not aware of them. These elements include knowledge of the marketplace, training of contact staff, and internal marketing. Enhanced service augmentation has significant effects on profitability and sales for the firms in this study, but it does not offer enhanced opportunities. The marketing support elements contribute significantly to all aspects of performance for the firms in this study

Success factors for new consumer financial services

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Management of financial services marketing : issues and perceptions

The aim is to identify those areas of marketing in the financial services sector that deserve to be given priority attention. A number of marketing areas are identified and assessed on their scope for improvement, the ease with which they can be changed and also on the sensitivity of the performance of the organisation to an improvement in the area. The perspective is that of senior financial services marketing managers. The managers picked out pricing policy as one factor deserving to be given the highest priority. Improvements here are possible and, in addition, will show up in better company performance. Two other factors considered to be worth priority attention are the customer interface and marketing influence, although both are thought to be more difficult to change than pricing policy. Improvements in the new product development strategy area, whilst likely to produce significant improvements in company performance, were the hardest of all to achieve