Service orientation as a strategic marketing tool: the moderating effect of business sector

Extending the service business in manufacturing firms has received significant attention in recent research. As it has been acknowledged by many authors, developing a service orientation can offer additional benefit potential. However, achieving profit with a competitive strategy depends on the firm’s characteristics and equally on environmental ones. In this scope, the present paper aims to identify antecedents to service orientation and the impact of this strategy on the firm’s performance.

The authors first conducted a qualitative research to identify the different forms used to serve clients. Then to test the hypotheses, the authors conducted a quantitative study on a sample of 130 Tunisian firms belonging to three key Tunisian industries.

The findings show that the managerial motivation, the firm’s characteristics in addition to environmental characteristics must be considered as antecedents to service orientation. The study has in fact verified the positive impact of service orientation on the firm’s performance and the fact that the business sector has a moderating effect on this relationship.

At the business level, marketing managers have to commit to finding new opportunities by valorizing market survey, establishing a management mechanism and controlling their service offer system. They have to try to internally “sell this service project” before thinking of adopting a service-oriented marketing strategy. However, industrial firms must equally take into account the services’ specificities for a better management of products/services. In fact, the intangible and the heterogeneous aspect of services increase risk perception and the degree of uncertainty among clients more than in a purchasing situation of a simple product. Consequently, marketing managers have to elaborate a specific approach, decide on a list of offered services, on their method and on quality standards to finally decide on the price. At the economic level, extending the service business has potential benefit for manufacturing firms and consequently for economy. Therefore, manufacturing firms seeking to invest in the service business must be encouraged by the government’s industrial policy. It is very important to help them overcome the obstacles to service adoption by providing financial incentives. In addition, it is very important to help them use and develop the technologies needed to improve the delivery of services.

In spite of the significant number of studies in this respect, the strategic perspective of service orientation was not as well developed as the organizational perspective and the theoretical development of this field remains underdeveloped. The authors noticed that the empirical applications of previous studies revealed divergent results that can be sometimes contradictory, particularly when they examine the impact of service orientation on performance. Besides, in recent research, “deservitization” appears as a solution adopted by managers who are unable to generate high revenues or margins to cover the additional investment in services. Consequently and considering the lack of consensus in previous studies, the authors’ principal objective is to identify the antecedents of service orientation and to test its impact on the industrial business performance. Additionally, and from an empirical point of view, the authors notice that the majority of past research on service orientation of industrial businesses was conducted in developed countries, whereas the empirical study of the present work was conducted in an emerging country in a transitional phase: Tunisia. Finally, because previous literature has assumed homogeneity on service strategies across sectors, the authors tried to show whether the business sector matters in terms of the relationship between service orientation and the manufacturing firm’s performance.